OPCW report blames Assad for chemical attacks in Syria for first time, ‘opening door’ for fresh sanctions

New report says Assad’s air force was behind three 2017 sarin and chlorine attacks on an opposition-held town which resulted in 100 casualties, Bel Trew reports.

An unconscious Syrian child waits for treatment at a hospital in Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the northwestern Idlib province, following a suspected gas attack on 4 April (Getty)

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has released its first report blaming Bashar al-Assad’s forces for sarin and chlorine gas attacks on civilians in Syria, opening the door for countries to impose fresh sanctions.

The damning findings were published on Wednesday by the OPCW’s investigation team, known as the IIT, which was established two years ago and awarded new powers to apportion blame.

Wednesday’s report found that the Syrian Arab Air Force, following orders from the “highest levels”, dropped sarin nerve gas and chlorine on ​Ltamenah three times on 24 March, 25 March and 30 March in 2017, resulting in over 100 casualties.

The town, which is located in Hama northern Syria, was at the time an important logistical hub for opposition armed groups.

The Hague-based body found that a SU-22 fighter jet left Shayrat airbase on 24 March and then dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin gas in the southern outskirts of Ltamenah, injuring at least 16 people including fighters, but also women and children.

The IIT said a day later a helicopter left Hama base and dropped up a cylinder on Ltamenah’s hospital, breaking the roof and releasing chlorine that killed three people and injured 32 more.

On 30 March, the body said another warplane dropped an M4000 bomb containing sarin on the southern suburbs of Ltamenah, injuring at least 60 people, including one who continues to require medical assistance today.

Santiago Onate-Laborde, the IIT’s coordinator, said that the team concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Assad’s forces were responsible for the air raids.

“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. Even if authority can be delegated, responsibility cannot,” he said.

“In the end, the IIT was unable to identify any other plausible explanation.”

The OPCW director general, Fernando Arias, added that the investigation team was not a judicial body with the authority to assign criminal responsibility or non-compliance with the chemical weapons convention. He called on the UN and the international community as a whole to “take any further action they deem appropriate and necessary”.

The report was released very close to the anniversary of the April 2018 chemical attack on Douma, a former rebel-held town in the Eastern Ghouta region, which killed over 80 people and prompted the UK, the US and France to bomb three Syrian government sites they said housed chemical weapons facilities.

Hopefully this will give real credence to redrawing the red line on the use of chemical weapons

Hamish De Bretton-Gordon, chemical weapons expert

The IIT is expected to release reports in the future also finding Assad’s forces to blame for the chlorine attack on Douma and a suspected sarin attack a year earlier which killed nearly 90 people in Khan Sheikhoun, located just a few kilometres north of Ltamenah.

The OPCW was created to enforce a 1997 treaty that banned chemical weapons but until a British-led campaign in 2018 created the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), it had only been authorised to say whether chemical attacks occurred, not who perpetrated them.

The Assad regime and Russia, its military backer in the nine-year civil war, have repeatedly denied using chemical weapons and accuse insurgents of staging the attack to implicate Syrian forces.

Russia has used its veto power in the Security Council to block previous initiatives that attempted to determine responsibility for the use of chemical weapons in the war.

In 2018, Russia’s OPCW ambassador Alexander Shulgin said the IIT was illegal and politicised. Syria’s representative to the OPCW vowed not to cooperate with the IIT’s investigations. Damascus blocked access to the team’s leader.

The Global Public Policy Institute in an extensive report published last year found the Assad regime responsible for a staggering 98 per cent of the 336 chemical weapons attacks they confirmed took place during the course of the Syrian civil war. They said that Isis was responsible for the rest.

The overwhelming majority of the attacks occurred after a 2013 agreement brokered by Russia and the US in which Syria allegedly destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile.

Rights groups and chemical weapons experts welcomed the OPCW’s Wednesday report.

Human Rights Watch said that Russia had worked for years to prevent attribution of blame for the repeated use of chemical weapons in Syria, “spreading conspiracy theories and using its veto to keep the UN Security Council paralysed”.

“Russia’s efforts didn’t succeed. Today’s confirmation that the Syrian military ‘at the highest level’ was responsible for sarin and chlorine attacks in 2017 should remove any doubt that the Syrian state deliberately used chemical weapons against its own people,” Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch said.

He added: “The OPCW’s conclusions should be used to support criminal justice for the individuals responsible.”

Chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who advises rights groups working in Syria and Iraq, said that Wednesday’s report allows countries to impose sanctions and “send a clear message to Assad not to use them again”.

“Hopefully this will give real credence to redrawing the red line on the use of chemical weapons,” he told The Independent.

Mr de Bretton-Gordon said there had been particular concern over the last opposition holdout in northwestern Syria, which until a ceasefire was brokered by Turkey and Russia in early March, was being pounded by Syrian regime forces backed by Moscow’s forces.

There are over four million people living within Idlib and western Aleppo, including 2.8 million in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN.

Of that, are nearly million are people internally displaced from the most recent bout of fighting.

“We have been very concerned that chemical weapons would be used in Idlib especially as some of the Russian agencies had been signalling it in reports,” Mr de Bretton-Gordon told The Independent.

“The only way Assad will take Idlib is with chemical weapons – is this the silver bullet that says no more?”

The UN has also come under fire this week for other investigations into attacks on civilians in Syria which were deemed “superficial” by rights group.

A summary of the 185-page confidential report was released Monday by a board of inquiry appointed by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres. It found that it was “highly probable” that the Syrian government or its allies were responsible for attacks on five facilities in the opposition-held northwest 2019, including a school, two health care centres, a hospital and a childcare facility.

The investigators said it is “probable” a sixth attack on a Palestinian refugee camp in Aleppo was carried out either by armed opposition or jihadi groups.

Mr Guterres said in a letter accompanying the report that the Syrian government did not respond to repeated requests to visit the country.

Human Rights Watch said the document refused to explicitly name Russia as another responsible party and that weak recommendations were “deeply disappointing” in light of the findings that the majority of the facilities investigated were attacked after their coordinates were shared with the UN.

“The widespread attacks on humanitarian facilities, including hospitals, are not only potential war crimes, but have led to a dangerous reduction in capacity to deal with current and future victims of Covid-19, which is already present in Syria,” HRW’s Charbonneau added.

“The recommendations are superficial, addressing cosmetic changes to the deconfliction mechanism rather than the very real possibility that data submitted to the UN wasn’t used to protect hospitals from attack but in order to target them.”

UPDATE (09.04.20) A previous version of this article referred to the report as being authored by a "United Nations chemical weapons watchdog". We have been asked to clarify that OPCW is an independent organisation, and is not part of the UN.