US calls for UN action over gas attack

The United States has demanded that Syrian President Bashar alAssad be held accountable by the United Nations Security Council after an official report confirmed his forces had attacked civilians with chlorine gas, a banned weapon.

One of the confirmed cases was an attack on the town of Sarmin in March last year. Soil tests carried out for The Times confirmed the use of chlorine.

The report, the first to name any culprit for the use of chemical weapons in Syria, also confirmed that Islamic State had used banned mustard gas.

The Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, alongside UN investigators, said they had sufficient evidence to determine that Syrian military helicopters had dropped bombs containing chlorine on civilians on at least two occasions.

Confirmation of the regime’s culpability raises the prospect of a fresh confrontation in the Security Council between the US and Russia over whether and how to punish Damascus. Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, has previously protected Assad from such censure and crafted a 2013 deal to remove his chemical weapons stocks from the country after a sarin gas attack by the regime killed hundreds in a suburb of Damascus.

Ned Price, the spokesman for the US National Security Council, said the report made it ‘‘impossible to deny that the Syrian regime has repeatedly used industrial chlorine as a weapon against its own people’’.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, will try to hammer out the final details of a co-operation agreement on fighting Isis in Syria during talks in Geneva today.

The talks take place just days after Syrian rebels backed by Turkish special forces, tanks and warplanes entered Jarablus, one of Isis’s last strongholds on the Turkish-Syrian border.

Turkish military shelled the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) south of Jarablus and demanded that they retreat to the east side of the Euphrates River within a week.

The Kurdish militia moved west of the river earlier this month as part of a US-backed operation to capture the key city of Manbij from Isis.

Turkey’s stance puts it at odds with Washington, which sees the YPG as a rare reliable ally in Syria.

Kurdish forces began pulling out of Manbij yesterday after being ordered to by their US backers.

The order has forced the Kurds to abandon their hopes of creating a semi-autonomous corridor along the Turkish border.

Ned Price, the spokesman for the US National Security Council, said a UN report made it ‘‘impossible to deny that the Syrian regime has repeatedly used industrial chlorine as a weapon against its own people’’.