TEL AVIV – Syrian President Bashar Assad’s envoy said on Sunday the American “empire” is poised to crumble, claiming without evidence that the joint missile attacks on Syrian chemical weapons sites were failures.

“The most important fact we should record here for Trump is that his missiles are not smart, not accurate – and that the Syrian air defenses have given the evidence that they are smarter and more accurate than his missiles. He should be careful about his tweets,” Bouthaina Shaaban claimed, according to the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese news site Al-Mayadeen.

In a joint operation with the UK and France, chemical weapons sites, including a storage facility and a research base, were targeted in the pre-dawn hours, constituting the largest military intervention so far since the civil war began. The military assault was a response to the chemical gas attack on the Syrian town of Douma last week in which 42 people reportedly died and many others, according to images and video, were left gasping for breath and foaming at the mouth.

Syria’s air defense systems, Shaaban falsely claimed, had sent Israelis fleeing to air raid shelters. No such event took place and it only later emerged that Israel had received advanced warning of the attack.

“Instead of the Syrian people going to shelters, they went to the rooftops to watch Syrian forces shoot down scores of Trump’s missiles before they could reach their goals. This, while the settlers of the Zionist entity fled to their shelters,” Shaaban claimed.

Shaaban also called the U.S. assertion that the sites targeted included a research facility for chemical and biological weapons a “lie.”

“The center of science and research which provides knowledge to the best Syrian students every year was targeted,” she wrote. “Trump is destroying this institution, which has no connection to producing any weapons. This is the lie of war about chemical weapons that Trump created.”

“There are two things that the West and the Zionists want,” Shaaban continued. “One is that there be no unity in the [Arab] nation. The other is that [the Arab nation] not arm itself with science and knowledge, the highest value for humans.

“The real response to their aggression, occupation and attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause and to humiliate the Arabs and pan-Arabism is to have more science and knowledge, and to develop our capabilities and air defense and laboratories, and to produce anything that secures the needs of our generation.”

Shaaban said that destroying the West – especially the U.S., UK, and France’s “evil aggression” – marks “the beginning of the vanishing of their empire.” That empire “will be replaced by new forces which respect the humanity, sovereignty and safety of peoples.”

“As the sun rises from the east, the sun of the just and free world will rise from here,” she concluded, in reference to the Syrian capital of Damascus.