Syrian President Bashar Assad interrupted a speech he was giving to parliament, to say he needed to “sit down for a minute” after suffering a brief drop in blood pressure.

Assad, 54, was half-an-hour through his speech when he began appearing tired and halted his speech twice to take a sip of water from a glass in front of him.

He was speaking about US sanctions on Syria and the economic crisis in the war-ravaged country when he told his audience: “My blood pressure has dropped and I need to drink water.”

Shortly afterwards, he said: “I need to sit for a minute if you don’t mind,” before exiting the room.

It was not clear how long he was away but when he returned, Assad, a trained optician, joked that “doctors are the worst patients”. He was greeted by applause from the MPs before him.

“I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon. I have no sugar or salt and this happens,” he added.

Assad spoke from a podium to the members of parliament wearing masks and social distancing, seated at least 2 metres apart in a huge hall.

Syria has seen a rising number of coronavirus infections recently, although the overall reported numbers remain low with 1,327 confirmed cases and 53 deaths. Limited testing facilities and Syrian government control over pandemic statistics have led to concerns that the real number of cases is much higher than what is being reported.

Earlier, the presidency’s office said the speech was halted for “several minutes” because of a “mild” case of low blood pressure the president suffered, after which he continued the speech as normal.

The presidency’s Facebook page posted that the speech would be aired later on Wednesday. It did not provide further details. Assad, 54, is not known to have any specific health condition.

Assad gave the speech on the occasion of the first parliament session after elections were held last month. The vote was the third to take place in Syria since the country’s conflict began in 2011.

The elections also coincided with Syria’s worst economic crisis and a currency crash, which has dragged more of the country’s population into poverty.

French intelligence has concluded that forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out a sarin nerve gas attack on April 4 in northern Syria and that Assad or members of his inner circle ordered the strike, a declassified report showed.

The chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun killed scores of people, according to a war monitor, Syrian opposition groups and Western countries. It prompted the United States to launch a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base, its first deliberate assault on the Assad government in the six-year-old conflict.

Assad has said in two media interviews since April 4 that the evidence of a poison gas attack was false and denied his government had ever used chemical weapons.

The six-page French document – drawn up by France’s military and foreign intelligence services and seen by Reuters – said it reached its conclusion based on samples they had obtained from the impact strike on the ground and a blood sample from a victim.

“We know, from a certain source, that the process of fabrication of the samples taken is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories,” Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters after presenting the findings to the cabinet.

“This method is the signature of the regime and it is what enables us to establish the responsibility of the attack. We know because we kept samples from previous attacks that we were able to use for comparison.”

Among the elements found in the samples were hexamine, a hallmark of sarin produced by the Syrian government, according to the report.

It said the findings matched the results of samples obtained by French intelligence, including an unexploded grenade, from an attack in Saraqib on April 29, 2013, which Western powers have accused the Assad government of carrying out.

“This production process is developed by Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) for the regime,” the report said.

The United States on Monday blacklisted 271 employees belonging to the agency.

Syria agreed in September 2013 to destroy its entire chemical weapons programme under a deal negotiated with the United States and Russia after hundreds of people were killed in a sarin gas attack in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus.

The report said that based on its assessments, there were “serious doubts on the accuracy, completeness and sincerity of the dismantlement of Syria’s chemical arsenal.”

SIX WARPLANE STRIKES

The report, which lists some 140 suspected chemical attacks in Syria since 2012, also said intelligence services were aware of a Syrian government Sukhoi 22 warplane that had struck six times on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 and that samples taken from the ground were consistent with an airborne projectile that had munitions loaded with sarin.

“The French intelligence services consider that only Bashar al-Assad and some of his most influential entourage can give the order to use chemical weapons,” the report said.

It added that jihadist groups in the area in Idlib province did not have the capacity to develop and launch such an attack and that Islamic State was not in the region.

Assad’s assertion that the attack was fabricated was “not credible” given the mass flows of casualties in a short space of time arriving in Syrian and Turkish hospitals as well as the sheer quantity of social media posts and video showing people with neurotoxic symptoms, said the report.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said on April 19 that sarin or a similar banned toxin was used in the Khan Sheikhoun attack, but it is not mandated to assign blame.

Russia, which backs Assad in the conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions, has said the gas was released by an air strike on a poison gas storage depot controlled by rebels.

“The Kremlin thinks as before that the only way to restore the truth of what happened in Idlib is impartial international investigation. We regret that OPCW restrains so far from such an investigation,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the French report.

A senior French diplomatic source said Paris had passed the report on to its partners and would continue to push for a probe.

Moscow was attempting to discredit the OPCW, the source said: “There is a propaganda effort by Russia to say that the OPCW’s work is not credible.”

We went to war in Iraq on a false premise, led by a man who had already hitched his mast to the warship of George Bush. So many lies, half-truths and media spun stories meant that public confidence has never been the same in international interventionism since Iraq.

So when the chance to act against Bashar Al Assad came in late 2013, Parliament voted against any action, dazed partly by the looming shadow of Iraq.

Fast forward to today and the incoherent and disastrous policies Western nations have taken in Syria, namely of inaction and hand wringing, and we have a civilian population who are bearing the murderous brunt of Assad and his regime. Their hands are not only steeped in blood, they are steeped in the entrails of Syria as a nation which lies like a deceased carcass on the floor. Syria as a nation, no longer lives.

Today, social media postings highlighted the absolute carnage and human rights abuses that are taking place by Assad forces, egged on and supported by another dictator sitting in the Kremlin, who has managed to run rings around the West. These are the painful pictures that show a humanitarian disaster unfolding as we wring our hands and as the opposition in our country has single handedly failed to stand up for military intervention in Syria. So weak is the political opposition that they cannot coherently put together a strategy, but then again, let us not forget who voted to hold the hands of our nation and military at a time when a difference could possibly have been made. It was that same political opposition that cowered in the Commons lobbies and who spoke about the spectre of Iraq when many of those same MPs had supported war in Iraq in 2003.

So as we read these social media statements, ask not what we have done for the people of Syria, but what we have done to the people of Syria through our inaction and moral ambivalence when so many die as we speak.

In the #HumanRightsDay a message for the #UnitedNations from inside the besieged #Aleppo
Stop Assad&Putin bombing#StandWithAleppo#Syria pic.twitter.com/auqpZDIji9

— Lina shamy (@Linashamy) December 10, 2016

A mother with her child and a whole family were killed by Assad and Russian warplanes in my district#StandWithAleppo#Aleppo #Syria pic.twitter.com/9EoNp1u6ox

— Lina shamy (@Linashamy) December 8, 2016

https://twitter.com/RevolutionSyria/status/807012858320080896

46 killed & 230+ injured in #Aleppo city yesterday after being targeted by 140+ aerial attacks,1200+ artillery & 3 chlorine barrel bombs.

— The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) December 9, 2016

Seeing what people have been suffering in #Aleppo hurts a lot more than death.#standWithAleppo @SyriaCivilDef pic.twitter.com/yao71ajrBO

— Ismail Alabdullah (@ismailSCD) December 9, 2016

Statement by East #Aleppo Doctors. #SyriaHasHeroes #StandWithAleppo #Syria pic.twitter.com/juZZHJNUfD

— Peymaneh Shafi (@Peymaneh_Sh) December 11, 2016

Final goodbyes from eastern #Aleppo.. pic.twitter.com/7NdrcBdXVz

— Pieter Nanninga (@pieternanninga) December 12, 2016

His face bloodied and completely covered in dust, the little boy sits quietly, staring ahead, dazed and shocked after an apparent air strike in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Alone in an ambulance, the boy – identified by doctors as five-year-old Omran Daqneesh – tries to wipe the blood off his head, unaware of the injury he has sustained.

Video of children being pulled from the rubble of a building hit by air strikes in Aleppo has been widely circulated on social media, causing upset and condemnation over the harrowing reality of Syria’s five-year war.

Aleppo, split into rebel- and government-controlled areas, has become the focus of fighting in Syria’s five-year conflict.

Rebel-held areas are suffering heavy air strikes daily as pro-government forces try to retake territory lost to rebels two weeks ago in the southwest of Aleppo.

The video was shot on Wednesday in the rebel-held al-Qaterji neighbourhood of the city.

It shows an aid worker carrying the little boy out of a building and placing him on a seat inside an ambulance, before rushing back out to the bombed-out scene. The boy sits alone, stunned, before two more children are brought into the vehicle. A man with blood on his face then joins them.

Aleppo-based freelance photographer Mohammed Raslan Abu Sheikh, who was at the scene, said civilian rescuers and aid workers were elated as Omran was pulled out of the rubble alive with the rest of his family of six.

“He was in a state of shock, not even crying, he made us cry while he himself was silent, just watching us,” Abu Sheikh told Reuters.

Last year, international sympathy for victims of Syria’s war was heightened by a photo of a drowned 3-year-old refugee from Syria, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish tourist beach. The image of Aylan, who died when a people smugglers’ boat taking his family and other refugees to a nearby Greek island capsized, swept across social media and was retweeted thousands of times.