Lies on the use of chemical weapons in Syria

Syria has denied it had used chemical weapons on rebel forces, denouncing as “lies” Western claims the nerve agent sarin was detected in samples sent from the front line.

A day after US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel went public with claims of sarin use “on a small scale” he believed came from regime forces, Syria’s Information Minister  Omran Al-Zoubi told Russian TV: “Everything the American minister and British government have said lacks credibility. It’s baseless, and it’s a new tactic to put political and economic pressure on Syria.”

President Obama, in his first comments about the new intelligence disclosure, has said, “For the Syrian government to utilize chemical weapons on its people crosses a line that will change my calculus and how the United States approaches these issues.” He has issued similar warnings for months, saying the use of chemical weapons or transfer of the stockpiles to terrorists would cross a “red line” and carry “enormous consequences.”

At the Nato conference of foreign ministers in Brussels this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the alliance’s Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, all proposed resuscitating the Geneva initiative for talks signed last year, with Mr Kerry stressing differences between Washington and the Kremlin were not as deep as before. The claim from “Israel” that the Syrian government has already used the nerve agent Sarin on other occasions immediately led to Mr Kerry being asked  why this was not seen as crossing the “red line” by Syrian government which, Obama had warned, would lead to a change in Washington’s Syria policy. Forty-eight hours later, pressed by supporters of the Syrian opposition, the White House sent out a letter to members of Congress saying US intelligence agencies believed “with varying degrees of confidence” chemical weapons were used against rebels.

The picture which is emerging from accounts given by Western and Middle Eastern officials and members of the Syrian opposition is this: the tests so far have not yielded conclusive results; they have been based on blood, hair and soil samples as well as photographs and video footage; the samples have not been collected independently by Western investigators inside Syria but handed over by the terrorists or, at least on one occasion, by Turkish intelligence; some of the footage may have been faked; the tests had been carried out at the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and in America. Conclusions on them vary within US intelligence agencies and the experience of Iraq and WMD is a source of caution among officials in Washington and London.

Dr Sally Leivesley, a chemical and biological analyst, and a former scientific adviser to the Home Office, said: “There are things here which do not add up. A chemical attack using Sarin would leave mass fatalities and very few people alive. From what one hears about the symptoms it’s possible a harassing agent rather than a nerve agent was used”. She added: “The latest ones show people with an eye disorder, which is obviously worrying but does not mean chemical [weapons] or Sarin was involved. Some of the earlier photos we had seen were odd: people in masks and gloves, who were supposedly doctors, touching the victims – something which will not happen. The symptoms we’ve seen could be caused by other elements, such as chlorine.

“What may be considered ‘evidence’ of the presence of chemical elements in things like hair samples could be something like pesticide, which is the reason American agencies want to wait for further tests. Could there have been some faking? Possibly, but if that is being done it’s not because people are bad; it’s because they are desperate.”

Analysts are also puzzled by the way Syrian government supposedly used its WMD arsenal. Dr Ralf Trapp, a specialist on chemical proliferation, said: “From a military perspective, it doesn’t make sense to use chemical weapons bit by bit. Why would the regime just put it on a grenade here or a rocket launcher there? It’s just not the way you would expect a military force to act.”

Source: the independent

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