ARON LUND
A few years ago, it could have sparked a major international crisis, but now, the conclusion of a UN investigative panel that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used nerve gas is unlikely to change the course of the war.
On October 26, an investigative panel created by the UN Security Council said it was “confident” that Assad’s air force was behind a chemical attack against the jihadi-controlled Syrian city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017. Not only that, but the nerve gas used was drawn from old Syrian stockpiles that Assad had vowed to destroy in 2013, providing further evidence that Damascus has systematically cheated international inspectors for the past four years.
Western governments are outraged at what they describe as Assad’s brutality and Russia’s complicity. Yet they are unable to seek accountability for the war crimes in Khan Sheikhoun through the UN Security Council, where Russia holds veto rights. Instead, it is the Russians that have gone on the offensive, threatening to eliminate the UN investigation altogether.
As Western governments scramble to find other ways to follow up on the report and salvage continued inspections, the truth is that the Kremlin holds a better hand. Although Assad’s critics may unilaterally impose sanctions or initiate investigations outside the Security Council’s remit, such initiatives are unlikely to change the Syrian government’s behavior or bring perpetrators to justice.
With Assad seemingly on track to win the Syrian war, some Western nations seem to fear that a major clash could weaken the international inspections regime in which Assad was snared in 2013. Ultimately, many seem to have concluded that ensuring continued access for international inspectors to Syria, even while recognizing that these inspections are flawed and cannot prevent Damascus from cheating on its commitments, is the best that can realistically be achieved.
It is a cruel and painful tradeoff, in which accountability for the victims of gas warfare may ultimately be sacrificed to shore up a flawed and frail system of inspections in the service of long-term nonproliferation goals. But on this question, there are no easy answers—just different ways of muddling through and trying to weigh one principle against another.
This Century Foundation report, which is the third in a series on Syria’s chemical weapons question—the previous two were “Red Line Redux: How Putin Tore Up Obama’s 2013 Syria Deal”1 from February 2017 and “Mission Impossible? Investigating the Khan Sheikhoun Nerve Gas Attack in Syria”2 from July 2017—is based on approximately two dozen interviews over the past year and in the last week, with diplomats and politicians, chemical weapons experts, and others involved with the investigations in Syria. It also draws on reports from the United Nations, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and other investigative bodies concerned with Syria, as well as on an extensive survey of media reports in English and Arabic.
The Killings in Khan Sheikhoun
Activists in Khan Sheikhoun, a small city of some 16,000 inhabitants on the lower end of northwestern Syria’s Idlib Governorate, reported that the city had been hit by a chemical bomb on early April 4, 2017.3 Local reporters, armed groups, and activists soon saw their claims echoed by the United States, France, and other governments, which concluded that a Syrian jet had dropped sarin nerve gas on the city, killing scores of locals. Two days after the attack, the United States launched cruise missiles against the Shayrat Air Base, from which the American government said the Syrian jet had taken off. Damascus and Moscow protested vehemently.4
When surrendering its chemical arms stockpile after a Russian-American deal in 2013, Syria had also been forced to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and its implementing body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).5 The OPCW is a multilateral organization with 192 state members—all signatories to the convention—that works closely with the UN, but is not part of it.
Since 2014, OPCW inspectors have been working in Syria through two separate mechanisms, both of which operate under ground rules agreed between the OPCW and the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
- The Declaration Assessment Team conducts talks and inspections aimed at verifying that all chemical arms were declared and destroyed in 2013-2014.6 The mission had so far come up short, and the OPCW noted in 2016 that the lack of full Syrian government cooperation prevented complete verification.7
- The Fact-Finding Mission was tasked with investigating reports of new chemical attacks. However, since the mission was “conditioned on having the support of the Syrians,” it was only allowed to investigate whether or not a chemical attack had been committed, and it could not name the suspected perpetrators.8
When news of Khan Sheikhoun broke, the OPCW quickly dispatched Fact-Finding Mission teams to Damascus and Turkey with orders to seek information from both the Syrian government and from Syrian groups in Idlib. For reasons of safety and because of the group’s limited mandate, the inspectors did not attempt to visit Khan Sheikhoun or the Shayrat Air Base, as Russia and the Syrian government insisted they should.9
The inspectors were, however, able to interview numerous witnesses, many of whom had been brought to their attention by either the Syrian government or by rebels and rebel-friendly NGOs, and worked to corroborate or falsify their stories using cross-examination techniques and physical and photographic evidence. OPCW scientists were able to conduct their own tests on wounded or deceased victims, and both sides also provided the inspectors with environmental samples from Khan Sheikhoun that tested positive for sarin.
CHILD TREATED AFTER KHAN SHEIKHOUN ATTACK. SOURCE IDLIB MEDIA CENTER.The fact that both rebels and loyalists concurred that sarin had been used and handed over samples that tested identically and matched the OPCW’s own biomedical samples helped dispel concerns over the so-called chain of custody—that is, the investigators’ ability to safeguard against evidence tampering.10 In late June 2017, the Fact-Finding Mission’s final report concluded that sarin had indeed been used. All sides endorsed this result.11
Contradictory Narratives
What remained, of course, was a sharp disagreement over who had released the sarin. Rebels, rebel-friendly NGOs, and pro-opposition governments insisted that a bomb had been dropped by the Syrian Arab Air Force in the morning of April 4, killing upwards of a hundred people.12 The United States released a map of the flight path of the airplane that had allegedly dropped the bomb.13
However, the Syrian government categorically denied using any chemical weapons.14 To counter the American and rebel claims, Syrian and Russian officials put forth a series of alternative scenarios, but their credibility was undermined by the fact that these versions often contradicted each other. Moscow and Damascus first claimed to know that nerve gas had been released from a secret jihadi chemical arms depot in Khan Sheikhoun when it was bombed by Syrian jets. When the OPCW issued its report in June, it undermined these claims. Both nations then dropped the depot story and instead claimed to have evidence that the rebels had set off a chemical bomb on the ground. Several other incongruent versions, whose only common denominator was that Assad was innocent, would also float through Russian and Syrian government media and statements from April until October.15
Neither Russian nor Syrian officials seemed to care whether their new claims about the attack were internally coherent or plausible, as long as they could exonerate Assad’s government.
To outside observers, these abrupt shifts and changes appeared less convincing than as additional evidence that Moscow and Damascus were engaged in a cover-up. Neither Russian nor Syrian officials seemed to care whether their new claims were internally coherent or plausible, as long as they could exonerate Assad’s government.16
The JIM Investigation
Once the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission had announced its sarin finding on June 29, the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) took over. Created through the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2235 in 2015, the JIM is a combined UN-OPCW mission, but in practice it operates mostly under the UN Security Council’s umbrella.17
The group has previously attributed three chlorine attacks to Assad’s forces. It has also accused the extremist group known as the Islamic State of carrying out attacks with mustard gas.18
Though it had a broader mandate, the JIM faced many of the same obstacles as the OPCW, including a brief episode of stalling behavior by Damascus and the dangers posed by fighting, bombing, anarchy, and extremist factions in the rebel-held territories.19
Already very hostile to the JIM since its chlorine identifications the previous year, Moscow and Damascus kept up a steady barrage of attacks on the mission’s credibility in the media. Both nations continually raised the need for a visit to the Shayrat Air Base and to Khan Sheikhoun, arguing that a failure to visit these sites would discredit the investigation.
The JIM visited Shayrat in early October to interview air force personnel and collect information on flight routes and Syrian Arab Air Force equipment, but the inspectors did not seek to take environmental samples, since they had no information on a specific location associated with chemical activities. Russian-Syrian criticism then shifted from calling for a visit to attacking the JIM for its purported refusal to take samples. In its report, the JIM notes that it would be useless and a waste of time and resources to randomly pick up soil from an air base that stretches over 10 square kilometers, half a year after an alleged, brief presence of chemical weapons.20 Russian and Syrian officials have ignored this argument and continue to portray the JIM’s failure to collect environmental samples at Shayrat as evidence of unprofessionalism or a sinister conspiracy.
As for Khan Sheikhoun, there was little chance that the JIM would send a team of unarmed chemists into a jihadi-ruled war zone, especially not since they had reason to believe that at least one party to the conflict would likely want to kill them rather than see their mission succeed. The time that had passed since the attack also limited the value of a visit—for example, the suspected impact crater, which was on Khan Sheikhoun’s main road, had long since been filled in with concrete.21
The JIM team therefore had to make do with information that could be gathered by other means, including material already collected by the OPCW. The JIM inspectors added fresh witness interviews, including with Syrian officials and air force personnel, and brought new chemical examinations to the table.
On October 26, the JIM’s report was finished and sent to Security Council members, and on November 2 it was made public.22
The Conclusions of the JIM Report
The JIM report noted that there was little evidence to support the early Moscow-Damascus narrative of an accidental sarin release from a bombed rebel depot. Echoing the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission, the JIM instead found that sarin had been released from a crater in northern Khan Sheikhoun, which Western governments and Syrian activists had consistently pointed to as the site of the attack. Russian and Syrian officials had also belatedly endorsed the crater theory, but argued that it had been caused by a ground explosion rather than an aerial bomb.
The appearance of the crater was well documented with photographic, satellite, and video footage. On the strength of this evidence, several forensic institutes and independent experts consulted by the JIM concluded that it was “most probably caused by a heavy object travelling at a high velocity, such as an aerial bomb with a small explosive charge.” Metal fragments seen in the crater “were likely from an aerial bomb.” The Moscow-Damascus scenario of a ground explosion “could not be completely ruled out,” wrote the JIM, but it was judged “less likely,” partly due to the lack of shrapnel and explosive damage to certain nearby objects.
Since the Syrian insurgents do not have airplanes and since no side had reported Russian, American, or other non-Syrian aircraft near Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, this determination pointed to the Syrian Arab Air Force as the likely perpetrator. After comparing radar-monitored flight paths, Shayrat flight logs, and corroborating information, the inspectors concluded that although Syrian government jets were at some distance from the city at the time of the alleged chemical airstrike, they would indeed have been able to hit the area of the crater.23
What the Sarin Said
The JIM’s most significant breakthrough came through an analysis of the sarin collected from Khan Sheikhoun.
The OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission had found sarin and related breakdown products in environmental samples provided by both the Syrian government and by rebel-connected NGOs and activists, and the inspectors had also conducted their own biomedical sampling of victims in Turkey. By analyzing these samples, the JIM was able to reverse-engineer the methods used to create the sarin found in Khan Sheikhoun. They found that it matched the sarin formula invented by the Syrian government.
Sarin can be made through several different processes. In the Syrian case, government scientists had configured it as a binary weapon, meaning that it was stored in the form of two separate chemicals, methylphosphonyl difluoride (DF) and isopropanol. Immediately before an attack, the two chemicals would be mixed and poured into munitions, then handed over to the military for deployment by airplane or missile.
The process is very dangerous if improperly done, not least because it produces highly corrosive gases. To reduce these side effects and increase the yield of sarin, the Syrians had realized that they could add hexamine, a commonly available commercial chemical. It was an ingenious solution that was unique to the Syrian production process, and international chemical weapons experts were initially baffled as to why Syria declared eighty tons of hexamine as part of their chemical weapons stockpile in 2013, before figuring out that it belonged to the sarin process.24 “To the best of my knowledge, they are the only people who used hexamine in their sarin formula. I have never seen hexamine mentioned by anyone else,” says former senior OPCW official Ralf Trapp. “You never see it in the literature.”25
Samples from sarin attacks in Syria in 2013, such as in Khan al-Assal and the Ghouta, also found hexamine traces. The 2017 attack in Khan Sheikhoun proved no exception: there was hexamine all over the sarin samples brought to OPCW inspectors, including in those volunteered by the Syrian government.
These findings left inspectors with little doubt that the sarin had been produced according to the Syrian government’s formula. It was suggestive of a Syrian government role, and the JIM then managed to take its analysis one step further.
By studying DF precursor traces from Khan Sheikhoun, the JIM was able to determine that they came from a batch of DF that had been in Syrian government warehouses when they were surrendered to the OCPW in 2013. The OPCW had sampled the stockpile at the time and kept records, and these were now used to match the DF handed over by the Syrian government in 2013 with the DF found in Khan Sheikhoun four years later.26
“It is as water-tight as it can be concerning where the precursors are from, where this weapon was manufactured,” says Magnus Normark, a senior analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Institute, whose experts were consulted by the JIM.27
What it meant was that part of Assad’s old stockpile still existed, saved from destruction and hidden somewhere, and was now being used to launch new chemical attacks.
After tallying up its list of conclusions—Khan Sheikhoun was attacked with government-origin sarin, the crater was caused by an airstrike, witnesses and survivors also described an air strike, and Syrian government jets were within firing range at the time—the JIM brought the hammer down. We are “confident that the Syrian Arab Republic is responsible for the release of sarin at Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April, 2017,” the report concluded.28
While alternative explanations could also be construed, they would rely on some combination of high-stakes conspiracy and freakish coincidences, involving a range of actors from al-Qaeda to the United States, as well as the JIM, the OPCW, and a large number of well-established international scientists, experts, and forensic institutes.
While alternative explanations could also be construed, they would rely on some combination of high-stakes conspiracy and freakish coincidences, involving a range of actors from al-Qaeda to the United States, as well as the JIM, the OPCW, and a large number of well-established international scientists, experts, and forensic institutes. There was no physical evidence for such a humongous plot or mass outbreak of human error, and none of these hundreds of people from numerous nations and walks of life—including Syrians injured and deprived of loved ones on April 4—had broken the omertà. While such speculation could certainly be entertained as an intellectual exercise, it stood little chance of surviving an encounter with Occam’s Razor.
Indeed, no chemical weapons expert contacted for this report has questioned the JIM’s conclusions.29 To the veteran disarmament specialist Paul Walker, the JIM report is “more convincing than ever that Syria is violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.”30
Western diplomats have of course praised the report, which confirms the version of events they have supported since April.31 “We are absolutely supportive of its findings, and I think they’re conclusive,” says a U.S. State Department official.32
Syrian and Russian officials take the opposite view. The Syrian Foreign Ministry accuses the JIM of acting on U.S. orders and said the report was “prepared in advance by the Western intelligence services.”chemical_attack_syria chemical_weapons chlorine_attack CVDCS_sy_org
