Western powers could attack Syria within days: envoys

PanARMENIAN.Net - Western powers could attack Syria within days, envoys from the United States and its allies told rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad, sources who attended the meeting told Reuters on Tuesday, August 27, the news agency reported.

U.S. forces in the region are "ready to go", Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, as Washington and its European and Middle Eastern partners honed plans to punish Assad for a major poison gas attack last week that killed hundreds of civilians.

Several sources who attended a meeting in Istanbul on Monday between Syrian opposition leaders and diplomats from Washington and other governments told Reuters that the rebels were told to expect military action and to get ready to negotiate a peace.

United Nations chemical weapons investigators, who finally crossed the frontline to take samples on Monday, put off a second trip to rebel-held suburbs of Damascus. But Washington said it already held Assad responsible for a "moral obscenity" and President Barack Obama would hold him to account for it.

However, with Russian and Chinese opposition complicating efforts to satisfy international law - and Western voters wary of new, far-off wars - Western leaders may not pull the trigger just yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron called parliament back from its summer recess for a session on Syria on Thursday.

He and Obama, as well as French President Francois Hollande, face tough questions about how an intervention, likely to be limited to air strikes, will end - and whether they risk handing power to anti-Western Islamist rebels if Assad is overthrown.