Russia and US pledge action on UN report
Moscow and Washington agree to draw a response after UN panel confimed use of chemical weapons by Assad regime
UNITED NATIONS// Russia will work with the United States on a response after UN investigators found that the Syrian regime had carried out chemical attacks, Moscow’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said yesterday.
“We have a joint interest in discouraging such things from happening, preventing such things from happening, even in the fog of war,” Mr Churkin told reporters.
An investigative panel set up by the UN Security Council said in a report on Wednesday that president Bashar Al Assad’s forces had carried out at least two chemical attacks in 2014 and last year.
It also found that ISIL had used mustard gas in an attack on the town of Marea in northern Aleppo province in August last year, according to the inquiry’s 95-page report.
Previous reports from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental watchdog, had concluded that toxic gases had been used as weapons in Syria’s five-year war, but stopped short of identifying the perpetrators.
The panel of inquiry, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism, for the first time pointed the finger of blame at the Syrian regime after years of denial from Damascus. Mr Churkin said he and his American counterpart Samantha Power had agreed to work together to follow up on the findings.
The United States has said it will seek to ensure consequences for those responsible for the use of chemical weapons.
Use of chlorine as a weapon is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013, under pressure from Russia.
The council is due to discuss the report on Tuesday and could decide to impose sanctions on Syria or ask the International Criminal Court to take up the matter as a war crime. Western diplomats expect Russia, a Syrian ally, to try to shield the Damascus regime from punitive action. Mr Churkin, however, brushed aside suggestions that there could be confrontation at the council, saying that “it doesn’t have to be the case”.
He described the finding by the UN investigators of mustard gas use by ISIL fighters as “very important” but sidestepped questions about the Syrian government using chlorine gas, saying the report was “very technical, very complicated” and required close study.
There was no such demurring from the United States, which backs Syria’s moderate opposition.
After the report was circulated among Security Council members on Wednesday, the US said the Syrian government was found to be responsible for using a chemical weapon in breach of a UN Security Council resolution and its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
“It is now impossible to deny that the Syrian regime has repeatedly used industrial chlorine as a weapon against its own people,” said US national security adviser Ned Price. The American ambassador to the UN, Ms Power, urged the Security Council to take “strong and swift action against those chemical weapons, which she called “a barbaric tool, repugnant to the conscience of mankind”.
The panel found that the Syrian regime had dropped chemical weapons on two villages in north-western Idlib province: Talmenes on April 21, 2014 and Sarmin on March 16, last year.
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 recommended further investigation of three other cases of suspected chemical weapons use by the Syrian regime.
There was insufficient information to reach a conclusion in the final three of the nine cases that the panel has been investigating for the past year.