by Reese Erlich
So the question remained: Who used chemical weapons and why? First, the official US government version.
On August 30, the White House issued a “government assessment” about the Al Ghouta attack. It stated that the sarin gas killed 1,429 people, including 426 children. The White House stated that the Syrian military had used chemical weapons previously. “This assessment is based on multiple streams of information including reporting of Syrian officials planning and executing chemical weapons attacks and laboratory analysis of physiological samples obtained from a number of individuals, which revealed exposure to sarin.”2 The statement went on to say, “We assess that the opposition has not used chemical weapons. We assess that the regime's frustration with its inability to secure large portions of Damascus may have contributed to its decision to use chemical weapons on August 21.”
As part of a coordinated effort to sway public opinion, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a series of talks and press conferences. He left no doubt that US intelligence had revealed who was responsible for the sarin attack. “We know where the rockets were launched from and at what time,” Kerry said. “We know where they landed and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition-controlled or contested neighborhoods.”3
The US position seemed to gather strength when Human Rights Watch and the New York Times indicated they had independently analyzed information that calculated the trajectory of the rockets that landed in the Al Ghouta area. Rick Gladstone and C. J. Chivers of the Times wrote, “When plotted and marked independently on maps by analysts from Human Rights Watch and by the New York Times, the United Nations data from two widely scattered impact sites pointed directly to a Syrian military complex.”4
The next day, the Times ran an even more detailed analysis showing the rockets were fired from a military complex solidly under government control, some nine kilometers from the Al Ghouta sites. Chivers wrote that the rockets were fired from Mount Qasioun, which he described as “Damascus's most prominent military position…. It is also a complex inseparably linked to the Assad family's rule.” The article held the top forces of the regime responsible for the attack and discounted the possibility that a rogue officer or a rebel mole carried it out.5
Within weeks, the US version of events began to fall apart. First was the matter of civilian deaths. The White House figure of 1,429, a strangely precise number for estimating mass deaths, was nearly three times the size of the highest estimates of other reliable sources. Doctors Without Borders, which had medical personnel on the ground in Al Ghouta, estimated 355 deaths.6 British intelligence indicated 350, and the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted 502.7 Only the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition group backed by Western powers, agreed with the US estimate. But when pressed by the Associated Press for a list of names, it could come up with only 395.8
Ake Sellstrom, head of the UN chemical-weapons inspection team, said the rebels significantly exaggerated the number of dead and injured treated in Al Ghouta hospitals. “We saw the capability of those hospitals, and it is impossible that they could have turned over the amount of people that they claim they did.”9 The discrepancy was explained when the Wall Street Journal revealed that US intelligence had scanned the rebel videos with face recognition software to count the number of dead.10 They made no on-scene investigation.
Second, the White House statement was a “government assessment,” not an intelligence assessment or National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The difference is significant. An NIE, for example, would contain dissenting opinions. And, according to several investigative reports, there was dissent. Some intelligence officers thought the report was an effort to help the administration save face for having failed to act sooner. One former intelligence officer told longtime New Yorker writer and famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that the Obama administration altered intelligence to make it look as if it was collected in real time. In fact, it was retrieved days later. In the London Review of Books, Hersh quoted the intelligence officer:
The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: “The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, ‘How can we help this guy’—Obama—‘when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?’”11
Third, serious questions arose about the White House and Kerry statements that the sarin rockets were fired from the heart of Assad-controlled Damascus. The New York Times and Human Rights Watch analyses assumed that the rockets were fired from over nine kilometers away. But a report published by missile experts showed otherwise. Richard Lloyd is a former UN weapons inspector and currently works at Tesla Labs in Arlington, Virginia. Theodore A. Postol is a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. They analyzed the data presented by the UN inspectors concerning the sarin-laden rockets. They concluded that the rockets would have a maximum range of two kilometers. When asked about this issue at a press conference, Chief UN chemical-weapons inspector Ake Sellstrom concurred that the two-kilometer range would be a “fair guess.”12 He later indicated the rockets could have been fired as close as one kilometer.13
Lloyd and Postol superimposed the two kilometer rocket range onto the White House maps. Their report said, “These munitions could not possibly have been fired at east Ghouta from the ‘heart,’ or from the eastern edge, of the Syrian government-controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013.”14
The report noted that these “improvised artillery rockets” could have been constructed by the army or the rebels. “The indigenous chemical munition could be manufactured by anyone who has access to a machine shop with modest capabilities, that is, the claim is incorrect that only the Syrian government could manufacture the munition.” The New York Times wrote about the report and noted the much shorter range but never retracted its erroneous reports that the rockets must have been fired from the Mount Qasioun military complex.15
Meanwhile, other investigative reporters were tracking down the origins of the Grads, the two guided rockets used in the chemical attack. Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, discovered that the Grads were apparently made in the Soviet Union in 1967. According to Fisk's Russian sources, the Soviets sold this batch of Grads to Yemen, Egypt, and Libya—but not Syria. The Russians didn't provide documentation, however.16 Right-wing Islamist groups in Libya have actively supported al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria. So it is possible that al-Nusra or ISIS received the rockets and chemicals from Libya.
Poking holes in the US government's case doesn't automatically mean the rebels were responsible, however. Eliot Higgins, a self-taught, British weapons expert who writes the Brown Moses Blog, said the Al Ghouta massacre was beyond the capability of a group like al-Nusra. Producing over fifty gallons of liquid sarin and loading it into rockets in the midst of a war zone is a massive undertaking. It requires huge amounts of specialized precursor chemicals and produces a toxic acid runoff. “Where is this factory?” he wrote. “Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people—not just one al-Qaeda member—needed to produce this amount of material?”17
Were the rebels militarily capable and politically willing to carry out a massive war crime against their own supporters? To find out, we must first take a look at sarin itself.
Sarin is a nerve agent first developed in 1938 Germany as a pesticide. The Nazis soon realized it was also a potent chemical weapon. In liquid or gaseous form, it can be deadly on contact. Sarin is a “clear, colorless, and tasteless liquid that has no odor in its pure form,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But when mixed in b
attlefield conditions, in which the chemical precursors become contaminated, sarin may produce an odor and a color. The CDC goes on to explain, “because it evaporates so quickly, Sarin presents an immediate but short-lived threat.”18
Iraq deployed sarin as a chemical weapon during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. A right-wing Japanese religious cult used sarin in the infamous Tokyo subway attacks of 1994–1995.19 Sarin is quite volatile and can't be stored for very long because it can corrode storage containers and warheads. So, sarin precursor chemicals are stored separately and then mixed prior to use. They can be mixed in a lab by trained technicians. Mixing in the battlefield can be very dangerous to both the technician and anyone nearby.20 The Syrian army has admitted having sarin precursors in large quantities. Some extremist rebel groups may have had some as well.
I spent some time in Damascus interviewing government officials and experts about the chemical-weapons issue. The Syrians presented a version of events sharply at odds with the US government narrative. On March 19, 2013, rebels used sarin against a progovernment neighborhood in the village of Khan Al Asal near Aleppo, according to Dr. Bassam Barakat, a medical doctor and progovernment political consultant. He told me that blood samples and other physical evidence were sent to Russia for analysis. Officials there wrote a one-hundred-page report indicating rebel use of sarin and delivered it to the United Nations, but neither party ever made it public. According to Barakat, the Russians confirmed that the sarin had originally come from the chemical stockpiles of Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi, who had been supplied by the old Soviet Union. Extremists in Libya shipped the sarin chemical precursors to Turkey, where they were then smuggled across the border into Syria, according to Barakat.21 Assad officials were so confident that they could prove the rebels had used the poison gas, they allowed UN chemical-weapons inspectors into Syria to investigate, but only after months of delay.
The final UN chemical-weapons report confirmed a number of points in the Syrian government version. Rebels were shelling Khan Al Asal prior to the chemical attack. At about 7:00 a.m., a munition hit the area some three hundred meters from a government checkpoint. The UN report indicated, “The air stood still and witnesses described a yellowish-green mist in the air and a pungent and strong sulfur-like smell…. The witnesses reported seeing people scratching their faces and bodies. They also observed people lying in the streets, some unconscious, some having convulsions and foaming from the mouth.”22
The UN inspectors concluded that Khan Al Asal had been attacked with sarin. The UN inspection team was unable to visit the town due to security concerns but was able to interview eyewitnesses and take medical samples of residents who had come to Damascus. A Syrian government report indicated that twenty people died from the sarin attack and 124 were injured. The UN report noted that some witnesses said the gas was from a helicopter while others said it was a munition explosion. The UN report did not indicate who was responsible for this or any other chemical attack.
Sergey Batsanov, a former Russian ambassador and director of special projects at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in Geneva, said delivery by helicopter seemed unlikely. The Syrian army would have had to install special spray tanks and put pilots in protective clothing. “I very much doubt it was delivered by helicopter,” he told me. “It makes no sense.”23
Those are the facts. Now the interpretation. It's been my experience that if something doesn't make sense politically, it doesn't make sense militarily. In this case, why would the Syrian army attack its own village? If it was seeking to discredit the rebels, why kill and injure so many of its own soldiers and civilians? On the other hand, the rebels—particularly extremists of al-Nusra and ISIS—would gain a lot from the use of chemical weapons. They would both kill the enemy, which included pro-Assad civilians, and discredit the Assad regime by blaming it for the attack.
One high UN official admitted that the government was not responsible for Khan Al Asal. Carla del Ponte told a Swiss TV interviewer, referring to the Asal incident, “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”24 Del Ponte was a member of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria and a former war-crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. After her initial statement, she and other members of the commission of inquiry stopped commenting.
Then, in late May, Turkish newspapers reported that suspected members of al-Nusra were arrested carrying two kilograms of sarin with plans to attack the US Air Force base at Adana, Turkey.25 By the time the case came to trial, however, the Turkish government did not prosecute the men for possessing sarin. There's no public record on why prosecutors didn't pursue the chemical-weapons issue.
In another incident in late May, Iraqi authorities arrested five alleged members of ISI, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, for building two labs to manufacture sarin and mustard gas. At a press conference, the police displayed lab equipment and weapons.26 ISI had close ties with al-Nusra at the time and was also carrying out its own activities inside Syria.
US intelligence likely knew about the al-Nusra/ISI chemical-weapons capability. F. Michael Maloof wrote that he was given a classified document from the army's National Ground Intelligence Center. “The document says sarin from al-Qaeda in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo [Khan Al Asal].”27 Maloof is a former security-policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense and a writer for the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. He's a controversial character, having been associated with the Bush-era neocons and stripped of his security clearance.28 But his right-wing contacts may well have supplied highly pertinent information.
Maloof wrote that the ISI had made a “bench-scale” form of sarin, that is, a small, homemade batch. He wrote, “Turkish security forces discovered a two-kilogram cylinder with sarin gas while searching homes of Syrian militants from the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra Front following their initial detention.”29 Seymour Hersh also reported that US intelligence agencies knew of the rebels’ chemical-weapons capabilities.30
Already by late May 2013, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in midsummer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical-weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in eastern Ghouta. The consultant (Hersh's unnamed source) told me that Tariq had been identified “as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin.” He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.31
Weapons expert Eliot Higgins believed the Syrian army was responsible for the Al Ghouta attack, but the rebels may have used limited amounts of sarin in Khan Al Asal. The opposition “could have acquired small amounts of sarin,” he wrote. “The regime recently stated that they had lost some [sarin] from Aleppo Airport…. The Khan Al Asal attack is different to the others, as it could be concluded that the opposition is responsible.” He concluded with a warning. “If the opposition is responsible for Khan Al Asal, then we all need to be on our guard, because if the opposition has sarin, so does AQ [al-Qaeda] and ISIS, and this would now be a global threat which we all need to be resilient against.”32
So it appears that al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels had the expertise and capability to carry out small-scale chemical attacks. In Khan Al Asal they may well have deployed sarin against the Syrian army and its supporters. The Syrians charge there was another, virtually unknown chemical-weapons attack in May 2013. Dr. Bassam Barakat described a sarin attack on an army checkpoint near the Scientific Studies and Research Cen
ter in Damascus, an area near Hamish Hospital. Barakat said a rebel mortar shell packed with sarin hit dozens of Syrian soldiers. Twenty died and one hundred were injured, according to Barakat.33
Syrian minister of justice Najm al-Ahmad confirmed the attack. “The soldiers died of suffocation,” he told me.34 He and Barakat argued that the Syrian army wouldn't use chemical gas against its own soldiers, and therefore the rebels had to be responsible. The incident was briefly reported on Syrian TV at the time but not mentioned further. I asked both men why such a horrific attack was not more widely publicized by the Syrian government. After all, an attack of such magnitude against government soldiers would point suspicion directly at the rebels. As far as I can tell, the incident was never reported to the United Nations and certainly wasn't included in the inspector's reports.
I became curious about one detail. The dead and injured soldiers were found at a checkpoint near the Scientific and Research Center, reportedly one of the top labs for creating sarin and other chemical weapons. Could an accident have happened at the center, causing the death and injuries? Of course, Syrian authorities deny it.
The United Nations reported on another sarin incident in Jobar, a town outside Damascus, on August 24, 2013, three days after the Al Ghouta attack. Because the UN inspectors were already in Damascus, they were able to conduct a firsthand investigation. According to the final UN report, ten soldiers were clearing an area when an improvised explosive device detonated, “releasing a very badly smelling gas.” The United Nations took blood samples, and one of the soldiers tested positive for sarin.
The United Nations reported a total of seven alleged chemical-weapons incidents. Inspectors were unable to collect enough data in some cases. Incidents included attacks on both rebel and progovernment areas. In one incident, a fifty-two-year-old woman living in a rebel area was taken to Turkey and later died. An autopsy by UN and Turkish doctors indicated she had been exposed to sarin. So what does this mixed record of likely responsibility mean for the massive attack on Al Ghouta?