Details missing from UN report on Syria

Report on regime gas attacks in Eastern Ghouta more damning than previously thought

At least twice this year, the Syrian military fired Iranian-made artillery shells filled with a chlorine-like substance that oozed poison slowly, giving victims just a few minutes to escape.

In another attack, Syrian forces dropped a chemical bomb on the top-floor balcony of an apartment building, killing 49 people, including 11 children. Their skin turned blue.

These details and others blaming Syria for atrocities in eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, were uncovered by a United Nations commission investigating and documenting possible war crimes in the 7-year-old conflict.

But when the commission issued the report on Wednesday, the details were omitted.

Seven pages that had been in an earlier draft, provided to The New York Times, were summarised in two paragraphs in the final document. Russia said yesterday that the US and its allies have relied on fabricated evidence to accuse the Syrian government of launching chemical attacks against civilians.

Russia’s foreign and defence ministries also charged the international chemical weapons watchdog with failing to objectively investigate the alleged chemical attacks and with being subject to political control. Major General Igor Kirillov, the chief of the Russian military’s radiation, chemical and biological protection unit, said investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had failed to visit the sites of alleged use of sarin and chlorine, and trusted evidence produced by activists, which he described as rigged. “The US, Britain, France and their allies have misled international community ... relying on fabrications to accuse Syria of violating the chemical weapons ban with Russian assistance,” Kirillov said at a briefing.

The commission’s report examined how the government of President Bashar Al Assad recaptured eastern Ghouta, the rebel stronghold near the capital, in the first four months of 2018.

Al Assad’s forces laid siege to the area, using bombardments, mass starvation and chemical weapons.

The materials in the leaked draft paint a far more frightening picture of chemical weapons use in eastern Ghouta than had been previously reported.

And they assert without qualification that Syrian forces and their allies were responsible, rebutting repeated denials by Al Assad’s government and his backers in Russia and Iran.

A member of the United Nations commission explained the omissions, saying that many of the details in the early draft needed additional corroboration and might be included in another report, perhaps by September.

The draft said that the eastern Ghouta attacks had followed “a pattern previously documented by the Commission concerning the use of chemical weapons by Government forces,” and that none of them had suggested “the involvement of armed groups.” The official version of the report was far more cautious about the chemical weapons incidents in question. In two attacks, for example, the report said the commission was “unable to obtain sufficient material evidence to conclusively identify the weapons delivery systems.”

While the circumstances in the April 7 attack were “largely consistent with the use of chlorine,” it said, the symptoms were more consistent with the use of “another chemical agent, most likely a nerve gas.”

The earlier draft of its report on eastern Ghouta was shared by a person close to the commission, who had been consulted on the report and who declined to be identified.

The leak suggested some internal dissension in the commission about the strength of its evidence concerning the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in eastern Ghouta.

It was also possible that the commission wanted to exercise caution ahead of an expected report on the April 7 attack in Douma by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which sent investigators to the site.