The world’s chemical weapons watchdog for the first time explicitly has blamed Syria for toxic attacks in the country, saying President Bashar al-Assad’s regime used sarin and chlorine three times in 2017.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons says it “has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the perpetrators of the use of sarin as a chemical weapon in Lataminah in 2017… and the use of chlorine… were individuals belonging to the Syrian Arab Air Force.”
The report is the first released by the Hague-based watchdog’s new Identification and Investigations Team (IIT), set up specifically to finger the perpetrators of chemical attacks in Syria’s ongoing nine-year-long civil war.
“Attacks of such a strategic nature would have only taken place on the basis of orders from the higher authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic military command,” IIT coordinator Santiago Onate-Laborde says in the OPCW statement.
“Even if authority can be delegated, responsibility cannot. In the end, the IIT was unable to identify any other plausible explanation,” he says.
The report says the attacks were carried out by two SU-22 jet fighters which dropped two bombs containing sarin on March 24 and 30, 2017, as well as by a Syrian military helicopter that dropped a cylinder containing chlorine on a hospital in the town of Al-Lataminah on March 25 that year.
— AFP
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From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
