Government launched sarin attack, says U.N.
GENEVA — U.N.-mandated investigators said Wednesday that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s air force conducted a sarin gas attack in the spring that killed at least 83 civilians and sparked a retaliatory U.S. strike.
The investigators also appealed to the U.S.-led coalition to better protect civilians as it strikes at Islamic State militants in the east.
The latest report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria offers among the strongest evidence yet of allegations that Assad’s forces conducted the April 4 attack on Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib province in which dozens of people were killed. The United States quickly blamed the Syrian government and launched a punitive strike on Shayrat air base, where the report says the Sukhoi-22 plane took off.
Syrian government officials have denied responsibility, and said last month that they would allow in U.N. teams to investigate.
“We have analyzed all the other interpretations” of who might have conducted the attack, commission chairman Paulo Pinheiro said at a Geneva news conference. “It is our task to verify these allegations, and we concluded ... that this attack was perpetrated by the Syrian air force.”
Wednesday’s report, the 14th by the commission since it was set up by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in 2011, covers little more than four months, from March to early July. The report is based on information retrieved from satellite images, video, photos, medical records, and over 300 interviews.
“The commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Syrian forces attacked Khan Sheikhoun with a sarin bomb at approximately 6.45 a.m. on 4 April, constituting the war crimes of using chemical weapons and indiscriminate attacks in a civilian inhabited area,” the report said.
The commission said the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack killed at least 83 people and wounded 293. It was among four chemical attacks the commission tallied over the span of its investigation — including the use of “weaponized chlorine” in three other locations.
The report, which also documents violations by al Qaeda’s branch and other militant groups in Syria, said the commission is gravely concerned about the impact of coalition air strikes on civilians in Raqqa, where U.S.-backed Syrian forces are battling the Islamic State. It also accused U.S. forces of failing to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians when attacking a mosque near Aleppo in March.
The report comes as Assad’s forces have advanced on a number of fronts against Islamic State and other insurgent groups.