Sarin nerve gas was used in Syria attack, watchdog confirms
Tests and victim statements used to check on weapon’s use in incident
An investigation by the international chemical weapons watchdog confirmed yesterday that sarin nerve gas was used in a deadly4 April attack on a town at the centre of Syria’s civil war. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province left more than 90 people dead, including women and children, and sparked outrage around the world as photos and video of the aftermath, including children dying on camera, were widely broadcast.
“I strongly condemn this atrocity, which wholly contradicts the norms enshrined in the Chemical Weapons Convention,” the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemifrom cal Weapons’ (OPCW) director-general Ahmet Uzumcu said. “The perpetrators of this horrific attack must be held accountable for their crimes.”
The investigation did not apportion blame. Its findings will be used by a joint United Nations-opcw investigation team to assess who was responsible. The OPCW has scheduled a meeting of its executive council for Wednesday to discuss the findings.
The US State Department said on Thursday night: “The facts reflect a despicable and highly dangerous record of chemical weapons use by the Assad regime.”
President Donald Trump cited images of the aftermath of the Khan Sheikhoun attack when he launched a punitive strike days later, firing cruise missiles on a Syrian government-controlled air base from where US officials said the Syrian military had launched the chemical attack.
It was the first direct American assault on the Syrian government and mr trump’ s most dramatic military order since becoming president months before.
Syrian president Bashar alassad has denied using chemical weapons. His staunch ally, Russian president Vladimir Putin, said earlier this month that he believed the attack was “a provocation” staged “by people who wanted to blame him [Assad] for that”.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said the report, which was not released in full, doesn’t back claims by the US and its allies that the sarin was dropped from aircraft.
The report “said they were not sure that the sarin found there had been airdropped in bombs”, Mr Lavrov said. “They don’t know how the sarin ended up there.”
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that while the report did not apportion blame, “the UK’S own assessment is that the Assad regime almost certainly carried out this abominable attack”.
Both the US and the OPCW were at pains to defend the probe’s methodology. Investigators did not visit the scene of the attack, deeming it too dangerous, but analysed samples victims and survivors and interviewed witnesses.
“A rigorous methodology was employed for conducting an investigation of alleged use of chemical weapons that took into account corroboration between interviewee testimonies; open-source research, documents, and other records; and the characteristics of the samples including those provided by the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic,” the OPCW.
The Syrian government joined the OPCW in 2013 after it was blamed for a deadly poison gas attack in a Damascus suburb. As it joined, Assad’s government declared some 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons and precursor chemicals which were subsequently destroyed in an unprecedented international operation.
However, the organisation still has unanswered questions about the completeness of Syria’s initial declaration, meaning that it has never conclusively been able to confirm that the country has no more chemical weapons.