France ready to strike chemical arms sites in Syria: Macron

France has expressed readiness to launch targeted strikes against any site in Syria used to deploy chemical arms and weapons that could result in the death of civilians.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who is on an official visit to India, said at a news conference on Monday that his country’s military would be ready to strike if it found “irrefutable evidence” chemical weapons had been used to kill civilians in Syria.
“The day we have, in particular in tandem with our American partners, irrefutable proof that the red line was crossed — namely the chemical weapons were used to lethal effect — we will do what the Americans themselves did moreover a few months ago; we would put ourselves in position to proceed with targeted strikes,” Macron said.
“We are cross-matching our own information with that of our allies but to put it very clearly we have an independent capacity to identify targets and launch strikes where needed,” the French president added.
Earlier on Monday, Russian media said that the Syrian military had found a workshop used by foreign-backed militants to make chemical weapons.
The workshop was discovered in a recently-liberated area in Eastern Ghouta where Syrian troops are fighting foreign-backed extremists and Takfiri terrorists, Russian news agencies reported Monday, citing a field commander.
This comes as Western governments and their allies have never stopped pointing the finger at Damascus whenever an apparent chemical attack takes place.
Syria surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the US and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry. Damascus has also consistently denied using chemical weapons over the course of the foreign-backed militancy that has gripped the country since 2011.