Criminal probes rise over Assad chemical arms use

PARIS — Chemical munitions experts have for years compiled information that Syria’s government has used these banned weapons against its own people, a war crime that so far has gone unpunished and been dismissed with a sneer by President Bashar Assad.

Now the first criminal inquiries that target Assad and his associates over the use of chemical weapons may soon get underway.

In a major step to hold Assad and his circle accountable for some of the worst atrocities committed in the decade-old Syria conflict, judges at a special war crimes unit in France’s palace of justice have received a complaint about chemical weapons attacks in Syria, filed by three international human rights groups.

The complaint, which lawyers said the judges would likely accept, requests a criminal investigation of Assad, his brother, Maher, and a litany of senior advisers and military officials that formed the chain of command.

Together with a similar complaint filed in Germany in October, the French complaint, submitted Monday and made public Tuesday, opens a new front aimed at ensuring that some form of justice for chemical weapons crimes is exacted on Assad and his hierarchy.

Steve Kostas, the senior lawyer of the group that filed the complaints in France, said it focused on the August 2013 events in the city of Douma and the region of Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus — coordinated attacks that the U.S. government said killed more than 1,400 people, making them the world’s deadliest use of chemical weapons in this century.

The victims of those assaults, who inhaled sarin nerve agent or chlorine fumes from bombs, are only a small proportion of the estimated 400,000 people killed since the Syria war began in March 2011.

More than 300 chemical weapons attacks in Syria have been documented by experts, including photographs and videos of adults and children, seized by convulsions, gasping for air and often suffocating.

“We want the French to conduct an independent investigation and ultimately to issue arrest warrants against those who bear responsibility for these crimes against civilians,” said Kostas, a senior lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative who is based in London.

“We know high-level perpetrators will not be arrested soon,” he said.

Among the witnesses they can bring, they say, are not only survivors of attacks, but also former members of the government who have been linked to the banned chemical arms arsenal or have knowledge of its workings.

Russia and China have blocked the road to the International Criminal Court for any prosecution of Syrian atrocities by using their veto in the U.N. Security Council, which could grant ICC jurisdiction.