Syria regime launched chemical attacks, IS used mustard gas — UN

UNITED NATIONS, United States: A UN investigation has established that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces carried out at least two chemical attacks in Syria and that Islamic State jihadists used mustard gas as a weapon, according to a report seen by AFP on Wednesday.

The panel was able to identify the perpetrators of three chemical attacks carried out in 2014 and 2015, but was unable to draw conclusions in the other six cases that it has been investigating over the past year.

The report from the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) found that the Syrian regime dropped chemical weapons on two villages in northwestern Idlib province: Talmenes on April 21, 2014 and Sarmin on March 16, 2015.

In both instances, Syrian air force helicopters dropped ‘a device’ on houses that was followed by the “release of a toxic substance,” which in the case of Sarmin matched “the characteristics of chlorine.”

The panel found that the Islamic State “was the only entity with the ability, capability, motive and the means to use sulphur mustard” in an attack on the town of Marea in northern Aleppo province on August 21, 2015.

The Assad regime has repeatedly denied that it has used chemical weapons in Syria, but the report said that in all three cases, it had “sufficient information to reach a conclusion on the actors involved.”

The JIM was set up by the Security Council a year ago to investigate the use of chemical weapons and for the first time to determine who is responsible for the attacks.

Most of the nine cases investigated pointed to the alleged use of chlorine gas in barrel bombs dropped from helicopters. — AFP