rebels. they re asking for the international community to hold saudi arabia accountable. and we re getting a new look at the devastation at yarmouk refugee camp in syria. this is how 18,000 palestinians in syria are living now near damasc damascus. isis seized almost all of yarmouk over the past week. meanwhile, the iraqi government has declared the city of tikrit safe and free of isis. but some displaced families say they are afraid to return home. arwa damon has more from baghdad. reporter: this 16 year old and her 17 year old sister were somehow spared the violence that s torn iraq apart since the u.s.-led invasion. we re not used to this, she
turn over its chemical weapons and avoid a u.s. strike, but he is confident it could happen. meantime in a new interview, syrian president bashar al assad says he s fully committed to the plan to hand his chemical weapons over to international control to be destroyed, which he says will take some time. he also once again denies responsibility for the august 21st sarin gas attack on damasc damascus, a suburb, that killed more nan 1,400 people. instead he continues to blame the rebels. we have evidence that the terrorist groups have used sarin gas, and those evidences, those evidence handed over to the russians. but second, the russian satellites since the beginning of these allegations at the 21st of august, they said that they have information through their satellites that the locket
by the regime. they also put out a map showing different locations around the capital of damascus where they believe people were affected by the chemical weapons attack. they say that is evidence of a widespread indiscriminate attack like the one that they suspect the syrians of carrying out earlier this year, jessica. devastating information. i m curious, does the administration say they know what assad s motivation may have been for a chemical weapons attack? reporter: well, administration officials on a conference call earlier this afternoon with reporters, jessica, said that they believe what the syrians were essentially doing was executing a military maneuver, that they believe that the syrians were seeing the rebels advancing toward the capital city of damascus and that they launched the chemical weapons essentially to keep the rebels at bay, and i talked to a white house official about that report earlier this afternoon, and that official said to me that they believe that th
there. hi, jim. i know you ve been working the story furiously. today the administration released its declassified intelligence assessment, its case for an attack, so what is the president s evidence? reporter: well, jessica, i can tell you from talking to a white house official, they feel pretty pleased about the way this intelligence assessment was received. just to walk through some of the evidence, the four-page document lays out the more than 1,400 people killed in the gas attack last week in damascus, around damasc damascus, and 400 children. but throughout this document, jessica, it s interesting to point out, they keep referring back to videos. they talk about how they ve identified 100 videos that they ve attributed to the attack, many of those videos documenting some of the chemical exposure that was suffered by many of the victims in this attack. and they also talk about intercepts of communications involving a senior official that they say was intimately familiar with the
used or not, this was the largest casualty figure in the history of the syrian conflict in the last two and a half years. if proven, this would be a game changer not just for the united states but for the international community. even though we do not have independent nchgs aboinformatio whether chemical weapons were used. the burden of proof lies on assad shoulders. he can convince the people by allowing u.n. inspectors who are already in damascus, you have a strong u.n. team to visit and grant access to his part of the eastern part of damascus in order to verify whether chemical weapons or gas were used a few days ago. i m going to interrupt. we have fred back on the phone