Tests Link Assad Regime Stockpile To Deadly Sarin Attack In Syria's Idlib
01 February 2018EsinIslam And
Agencies
The Assad regime's chemical weapons stockpile has been linked for the first
time by laboratory tests to the largest sarin nerve agent attack of the civil
war, diplomats and scientists told Reuters, supporting Western claims that
regime forces under were behind the atrocity.
Laboratories working for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons compared samples taken by a U.N. mission in the Damascus suburb of
Ghouta after the Aug. 21, 2013 attack, when hundreds of civilians died of
sarin gas poisoning, to chemicals handed over by Damascus for destruction in
2014.
The tests found 'markers' in samples taken at Ghouta and at the sites of two
other nerve agent attacks, in the towns of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib governorate
on April 4, 2017 and Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, in March 2013, two people involved
in the process said.
'We compared Khan Sheikhoun, Khan al-Assal, Ghouta,' said one source who asked
not to be named because of the sensitivity of the findings. 'There were
signatures in all three of them that matched.'
The same test results were the basis for a report by the OPCW-United Nations
Joint Investigative Mechanism in October which said the Assad regime was
responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun attack, which killed dozens.
The findings on Ghouta, whose details were confirmed to Reuters by two
separate diplomatic sources, were not released in the October report to the
U.N. Security Council because they were not part of the team's mandate.
They will nonetheless bolster claims by the United States, Britain and other
Western powers that the Assad regime still possesses and uses banned munitions
in violation of several Security Council resolutions and the Chemical Weapons
Convention.
The OPCW declined to comment. Syria has repeatedly denied using chemical
weapons in the conflict now in its seventh year and has blamed the chemical
attacks in the opposition-held territory of Ghouta on the opposition fighters
themselves.
Russia has also denied that Assad regime forces have carried out chemical
attacks and has questioned the reliability of the OCPW inquiries. Officials in
Moscow have said the opposition staged the attacks to discredit the Assad
regime and whip up international condemnation.
Under a U.S.-Russian deal after the Ghouta attack in 2013, Damascus joined the
OPCW and agreed to permanently eliminate its chemical weapons program,
including destroying a 1,300-ton stockpile of industrial precursors that has
now been linked to the Ghouta attack.
But inspectors have found proof of an ongoing chemical weapons program in
Syria, including the systematic use of chlorine barrel bombs and sarin, which
they say was ordered at the highest levels of government.
The sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April last year prompted U.S. President
Donald Trump to order a missile strike against the Shayrat air base, from
which the Syrian operation is said to have been launched.
Diplomatic and scientific sources said efforts by Syria and Russia to
discredit the U.N.-OPCW tests establishing a connection to Ghouta have so far
come up with nothing.
Russia's blocking of resolutions at the Security Council seeking
accountability for war crimes in Syria gained new relevance when Russia
stationed its aircraft at Shayrat in 2015.
Washington fired missiles at Shayrat in April 2017, saying the Syrian air
force used it to stage the Khan Sheikhoun sarin attack April 4 a few days
earlier, killing more than 80 people.
No Russian military assets are believed to have been hit, but Moscow warned at
the time it could have serious consequences.
In June, the Pentagon said it had seen what appeared to be preparations for
another chemical attack at the same airfield, prompting Russia to say it would
respond proportionately if Washington took pre-emptive measures against Syrian
forces there.
The chemical tests were carried out at the request of the U.N.-OPCW inquiry,
which was searching for potential links between the stockpile and samples from
Khan Sheikhoun. The analysis results raised the possibility that they would
provide a link to other sarin attacks, the source said.
Two compounds in the Ghouta sample matched those also found in Khan Sheikhoun,
one formed from sarin and the stabilizer hexamine and another specific
fluorophosphate that appears during sarin production, the tests showed.
'Like in all science, it should be repeated a couple of times, but it was
serious matching and serious laboratory work,' the source said.
Independent experts, however, said the findings are the strongest scientific
evidence to date that the regime was behind Ghouta, the deadliest chemical
weapons attack since the Halabja massacres of 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War.
'A match of samples from the 2013 Ghouta attacks to tests of chemicals in the
Syrian stockpile is the equivalent of DNA evidence: definitive proof,' said
Amy Smithson, a U.S. nonproliferation expert.
The hexamine finding 'is a particularly significant match,' Smithson said,
because it is a chemical identified as a unique hallmark of the Syrian
military's process to make sarin.
'This match adds to the mountain of physical evidence that points
conclusively, without a shadow of doubt, to the Syrian government,' she said.
Smithson and other sources familiar with the matter said it would have been
virtually impossible for the rebels to carry out a coordinated, large-scale
strike with poisonous munitions, even if they had been able to steal the
chemicals from the regime's stockpile.
'I don't think there is a cat in hell's chance that the opposition or Daesh
were responsible for the Aug. 21 Ghouta attack,' said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon,
an independent specialist in biological and chemical weapons.
The U.N.-OPCW inquiry, which was disbanded in November after being blocked by
Syria's ally Russia at the U.N. Security Council, also found that Islamic
State had used the less toxic blistering agent sulphur mustard gas on a small
scale in Syria.
The Ghouta attack, by comparison, was textbook chemical warfare, Smithson and
de Bretton-Gordon said, perfectly executed by forces trained to handle sarin,
a toxin which is more difficult to use because it must be mixed just before
delivery.
Surface-to-surface rockets delivered hundreds of liters of sarin in perfect
weather conditions that made them as lethal as possible: low temperatures and
wind in the early hours of the morning, when the gas would remain concentrated
and kill sleeping victims, many of them children.
Pre-attack air raids with conventional bombs shattered windows and doors and
drove people into shelters where the heavy poison seeped down into underground
hiding places. Aerial bombing afterward sought to destroy the evidence.
The large quantity of chemicals used, along with radar images of rocket traces
showing they originated from Syrian Brigade positions, are further proof that
the rebels could not have carried out the Ghouta attack, the experts said.
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