Thread: U.N. Report Confirms Rockets Loaded With Sarin in Aug. 21 Attack

U.N. Report Confirms Rockets Loaded With Sarin in Aug. 21 Attack

By RICK GLADSTONE and NICK CUMMING-BRUCE
Published: September 16, 2013

Rockets armed with the banned chemical nerve agent sarin were used in a mass killing near Damascus on Aug. 21, United Nations chemical weapons inspectors reported on Monday in the first official confirmation by scientific experts that such munitions had been deployed in the Syria conflict.

livelatest Syria Updates Updates on Syria

The Times is tracking the conflict and the international response.

• Latest Updates

• Document: The Chemical Weapons Report

Although the widely awaited report did not ascribe blame for the attack, it concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.”
The inspectors, who visited the Damascus suburbs that suffered the attack and left the country with large amounts of evidence 10 days after the episode, said that “the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin” were used.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who ordered the report, received it on Sunday and presented it to the 15-member Security Council on Monday in a closed-door session.
Although the report confirmed what the United States, its allies and Human Rights Watch had already concluded about the nature of the attack, it was nonetheless regarded as important as the first purely scientific and politically neutral accounting of the facts about the weapons that were used.
The United States and its allies have accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of responsibility for the attack. Mr. Assad and Russia, his principal foreign ally, have said Syrian insurgents were responsible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/world/europe/syria-united-nations.html?_r=0

CBS/AP/ September 16, 2013, 11:35 AM U.N. war crimes panel says 14 possible chemical weapons attacks in Syria, and rebel atrocities mounting


Chairman of the United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry on Syria (LtoR), Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, arrives to a press conference in Geneva, Sept. 16, 2013. / Getty


Geneva The chairman of a U.N. war crimes panel on Monday said his team was investigating 14 suspected chemical attacks in Syria, dramatically escalating the stakes after diplomatic breakthroughs that saw the Syrian government agree to dismantle its chemical weapons program.
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said the Geneva-based U.N. panel he heads has not pinpointed the chemical used in the attacks and is awaiting evidence from a separate team of U.N. chemical weapons inspectors expected to be made public later Monday.
Play Video
Kerry briefs U.S. allies on Syrian chemical weapons agreement

That report is expected to add momentum to a deal to eradicate Syria's chemical weapons program.
Pinheiro also said the panel believes Assad's government has been responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, while rebel groups have perpetrated war crimes but not crimes against humanity "because there is not a clear chain of command."
While the new assessment from Pinheiro will likely be used by the U.S. and other nations to push for a political solution to the crisis which includes President Bashar Assad handing over power to a transitional government, it also highlights the challenges in finding a viable replacement for him.
The Obama administration has backed an umbrella opposition group based in Turkey, the Syrian National Coalition, but the leaders of that group's military division control only a limited number of the thousands of fighters battling Assad's forces on the ground.
Play Video
Number of extremist rebels difficult to determine

Pinheiro said Monday that had been an "upsurge in crimes and abuses committed by extremist anti-government armed groups along with an influx of rebel foreign fighters," primarily in northern Syria, where the rebels hold more territory.
"Entire brigades are now made up from fighters who have crossed into Syria," he said.
"The point is that these extreme elements have their own agenda and certainly not a democratic agenda that they are seeking to impose," Reuters quoted commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn as saying. "That is a major worry from our side of the fence."
The military and security consultancy IHS Jane's said, meanwhile, that almost half of the fighters battling Assad's military and its allies in Syria were believed to be Islamic extremists.
Secretary of State John Kerry rejected the notion earlier this month that jihadist militants comprise the majority of the anti-Assad fighters in Syria, saying the best estimate of the U.S. government was that 15 - 25 percent were Islamic militants.
Kerry said the claim that Islamists were a majority was "basically incorrect" and argued that the opposition had "increasingly become more defined by its moderation."
Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a long-time ally to Syrian President Assad, appeared the next day to call Kerry a "liar" for his assessment of how many rebels were jihadists.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57603095/u.n-war-crimes-panel-says-14-possible-chemical-weapons-attacks-in-syria-and-rebel-atrocities-mounting/

RELATED

Turkish warplanes shoot down Syrian helicopter

Forensic Details in U.N. Report Point to Assad’s Use of Gas

By RICK GLADSTONE and C. J. CHIVERS

Published: September 16, 2013

A United Nations report released on Monday confirmed that a deadly chemical arms attack caused a mass killing in Syria last month and for the first time provided extensive forensic details of the weapons used, which strongly implicated the Syrian government.

livelatest Syria Updates Updates on Syria

The Times is tracking the conflict and the international response.

• Latest Updates

• 5:14 PM Russian Sticks to Claim Deadly Attack Was 'Fabricated'
• 10:14 AM U.N. Report Echoes Open-Source Investigations
• 10:13 AM Syria's War, Through Iranian Eyes

More Updates »







While the report’s authors did not assign blame for the attack on the outskirts of Damascus, the details it documented included the large size and particular shape of the munitions and the precise direction from which two of them had been fired.

Taken together, that information appeared to undercut arguments by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that rebel forces, who are not known to possess such weapons or the training or ability to use them, had been responsible.

The report, commissioned by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was the first independent on-the-ground scientific inquest into the attack, which left hundreds of civilians gassed to death, including children, early on Aug. 21.

The repercussions have elevated the 30-month-old Syrian conflict into a global political crisis that is testing the limits of impunity over the use of chemical weapons. It could also lead to the first concerted action on the war at the United Nations Security Council, which up to now has been paralyzed over Syria policy.
“The report makes for chilling reading,” Mr. Ban told a news conference after he briefed the Security Council. “The findings are beyond doubt and beyond the pale. This is a war crime.”

Mr. Ban declined to ascribe blame, saying that responsibility was up to others, but he expressed hope that the attack would become a catalyst for a new diplomatic determination at the United Nations to resolve the Syrian conflict, which has left more than 100,000 people dead and millions displaced.

There was no immediate reaction to the report from the Syrian government. But just two days before the report was released, Syria officially agreed to join the international convention on banning chemical weapons, and the United States and Russia, which have repeatedly clashed over Syria, agreed on a plan to identify and purge those weapons from the country by the middle of next year. Syria has said it would abide by that plan.

The main point of the report was to establish whether chemical weapons had been used in the Aug. 21 attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, an area long infiltrated by rebels. The United Nations inspectors concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.”
The weapons inspectors, who visited Ghouta and left the country with large amounts of evidence on Aug. 31, said, “In particular, the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used.”

But the report’s annexes, detailing what the authors found, were what caught the attention of nonproliferation experts.

In one particularly incriminating piece of information, the inspectors said the remnants of a warhead found in the attack’s aftermath showed its capacity of sarin to be about 56 liters — far larger than the suspected delivery systems used in alleged chemical weapons attacks before the Aug. 21 strike.

The investigators were unable to examine all of the munitions used, but were able to find and measure several rockets or their components. Using standard field techniques for ordnance identification and crater analysis, they established that at least two types of rockets had been used, including an M14 artillery rocket bearing Cyrillic markings and a 330-millimeter rocket of unidentified provenance.

These findings, though not presented as evidence of responsibility, were likely to strengthen the argument of those who claim the Syrian government bears the blame, because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency. Moreover, those weapons are fired by large, conspicuous launchers. For rebels to have carried out the attack, they would have had to organize an operation with weapons they are not known to have and of considerable scale, sophistication and secrecy — moving the launchers undetected into position in areas under strong government influence or control, keeping them in place unmolested for a sustained attack that would have generated extensive light and noise, and then successfully withdrawing them — all without being detected in any way.
livelatest Syria Updates Updates on Syria

The Times is tracking the conflict and the international response.



One annex to the report also identified azimuths, or angular measurements, from where rockets had struck, back to their points of origin. 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.




Other nonproliferation experts said the United Nations report was damning in its implicit incrimination of Mr. Assad’s side in the conflict, not only in the weaponry fragments but the azimuth data that indicated the attack’s origins. An analysis of the report posted online by the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said “the additional details and the perceived objectivity of the inspectors buttress the assignment of blame to Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government.”

The United States and its allies seized on the volume of data in the report to reaffirm their conclusion that only Syrian government forces had the ability to carry out such a strike, calling it a validation of their own long-held assertions.

Both the British and American ambassadors to the United Nations also told reporters that the report’s lead author, Dr. Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish scientist who joined Mr. Ban in the Security Council briefing, had told members that quality of the sarin used in the attack was high.

“This was no cottage-industry use of chemical weapons,” said the British ambassador, Sir Mark Lyall-Grant. “The type of munitions, the trajectories, which confirmed the analysis that British experts have done about the provenance of where the rockets were fired from, all of that confirms, in our view, that there is no remaining doubt that it was the regime that used chemical weapons.”

Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, acknowledged implicitly the credibility issue that has confronted the United States on Syria chemical weapons use, a legacy of the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led the United States into the Iraq war a decade ago.

“We understand some countries did not accept on faith that the samples of blood and hair that the United States received from people affected by the Aug. 21 attack contained sarin,” she said. “But now Dr. Sellstrom’s samples show the same thing. And it’s very important to note that the regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition posses sarin.”

Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, said there were still too many unanswered questions. In talking to reporters, he asked, if the Syrian forces had indeed been responsible and sought to attack insurgents, “how is it possible to fire projectiles at your opponent and miss them all?”

“We need not jump to any conclusions,” he said.

The report’s release punctuated a tumultuous week spawned by the global outrage over the attack, in which an American threat of punitive force on the Syrian government was delayed as Russia proposed a diplomatic alternative and intense negotiations between the United States and Russia led to a sweeping agreement under which Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal could be destroyed.

The United Nations, in danger of becoming irrelevant in helping to end the Syria conflict, was suddenly thrust back into a central role, with the Security Council now engaged in deliberations over an enforceable measure to hold Syria to its commitment on chemical weapons.

Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of France and Britain said Monday that they would not tolerate delays in dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons.

“It is extremely important that there are no evasions,” William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said at a news conference with Mr. Kerry in Paris.

Mr. Kerry said, “If Assad fails in time to abide by the terms of this framework, make no mistake, we are all agreed — and that includes Russia — that there will be consequences.”

The release of the report came as a separate panel of investigators from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva said they were investigating 14 episodes of suspected chemical weapons use.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/wo...ions.html?_r=0