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Report: Assad behind sarin attack
UN investigators say Syrian air force conducted April attack that killed at least 83.
GENEVA — Syrian President Bashar Assad’s air force conducted a sarin-gas attack that killed at least 83 civilians in April, one of 20 chemical weapons attacks perpetrated by the Syrian government in the past four years, U.N.-mandated investigators said Wednesday.
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 some of the strongest evidence yet of allegations that Assad’s forces carried out the April 4 attack on Khan Sheikhon in rebel-held Idlib province in which dozens of people were killed. The United States 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. Russia said the United States and its Western allies rushed to judgment and blamed the Syrian government without ever visiting the site.
“It is our task to verify these allegations, and we concluded that this attack was perpetrated by the Syrian air force,” commission chairman Paulo Pinheiro said at a Geneva news conference.
Wednesday’s report, the 14th by the commission since it was set up by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in 2011, covers from March to early July. The report is based on information retrieved from satellite images, video, photos, medical records and more than 300 interviews.
“The commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Syrian forces attacked Khan Sheikhon 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 Sheikhon 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.
However it documented 25 incidents of chemical weapons use in Syria between March 2013 and March 2017, of which 20 were perpetrated by government forces and used primarily against civilians.
The report, which also documents violations by al-Qaida’s branch and other militant groups in Syria, said the commission is gravely concerned about the impact of coalition airstrikes on civilians in Raqqa, where U.S.-backed Syrian forces are battling the Islamic State, also called ISIS.
It also accused U.S. forces of failing 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 ISIS and other insurgent groups. De-escalation zones set up by Russia, Iran and Turkey have meanwhile reduced the fighting in some areas. Syrian government forces, backed by Russian and Iranian firepower and troops, on Tuesday broke a nearly three-year siege by ISIS over parts of the eastern city of Deir el-Zour.