Investigators back chlorine-attack claims

The authority that polices the treaty banning chemical arms said Friday that it had found “reasonable grounds” that chlorine weapons were deployed in a fatal assault on a rebel Syrian town last year.

A report by inspectors from the authority, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, is the most definitive finding yet to corroborate allegations that chemical weapons were dropped on the town, Douma, a suburb of Damascus, killing 43 people on April 7, 2018.

The United States and its allies have blamed President Bashar Assad’s forces. Assad and his principal ally, Russia, rejected the accusations and suggested the attack had been carried out by the rebels themselves or may have even been a hoax.

Chemical weapons use, a war crime, has become a recurrent theme in the 8-yearold conflict in Syria.

The Douma attack came a year after a chemical arms assault on the northern rebel-held village of Khan Sheikhoun killed around 100 people, a strike that the West also attributed to Assad, who denied the accusations.

President Donald Trump ordered a missile assault on a Syrian military airfield after the Khan Sheikhoun attack in what he described as a punishment and a warning to Assad. After the Douma attack, the United States, Britain and France all launched punitive airstrikes against Syrian government targets.

The Syrian authorities initially barred inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from the Douma site, fueling Western suspicions of a cover-up.

The inspectors were eventually able to visit, interview witnesses, examine a warehouse and collect and analyze samples. They were not able to examine any of the victims’ bodies, which had been buried by the time the inspectors were able to enter Douma.

Nonetheless, the cumulative evidence, presented in the report released by the organization, provided “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

The organization, based in The Hague, Netherlands, is responsible for adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, a treaty that bans the use of any toxins to kill or injure, including chlorine, a common industrial chemical that can be fatally toxic. Chlorine’s first use as a weapon dates to World War I.

Assad’s government signed the treaty in 2013 and agreed to eliminate the chemical arms stockpiles it had declared, under the supervision of the organization and the United Nations.

But dozens of cases have been confirmed in the years since, raising suspicions among Assad’s adversaries that he did not destroy his entire arsenal.

In 2016, a joint team of the organization and the United Nations found that the Syrian government had repeatedly dropped chlorine bombs on civilians, and that the Islamic State had used sulfur mustard.

In 2017, the team documented the Syrian government’s use of the nerve agent sarin in the Khan Sheikhoun assault. Syria and Russia called the conclusions fabricated.

At the time of the attack on Douma, it was held by rebels fighting Assad’s forces, which controlled the airspace over the town. Damage on a bomb casing found in Douma showed evidence that it had been dropped from an aircraft, and black residue suggested a chemical reaction of chlorine.

The Douma report does not assign blame, which was outside the mandate of the team sent to investigate. In June, however, the organization’s members decided to begin investigating and attributing responsibility for chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Louis Charbonneau, the U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said the finding on Douma “adds one more case to the scores of illegal chemical weapons attacks” that have recurred in Syria.

“It’s clear that the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’] new unit for attributing blame for chemical weapons attacks in Syria has its work cut out,” Charbonneau said in a statement.