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An investigation by the global chemical weapons watchdog said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that the Syrian Air Force dropped two cylinders containing chlorine gas on the city of Douma in April 2018, killing 43 people.
A report published Friday by a team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) provided the latest evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime used chemical weapons during his civil war.
“The use of chemical weapons in Douma and anywhere is unacceptable and violates international law,” said Fernando Arias, director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
“Reasonable grounds to believe” is the standard of proof consistently applied by international fact-finding agencies and commissions of inquiry, the group said.
Syria, which has been blamed for another deadly chemical weapons attack for joining the OPCW in 2013 under international pressure, does not recognize the authority of the investigation team and has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons.
Despite the latest findings, there is still a long way to go to bring the perpetrators in Syria to justice.
Syria’s ally Russia has in the past blocked efforts by the UN Security Council to order an ICC investigation into Syria.
“The whole world now knows the truth – that the international community has a responsibility to act both inside and outside the OPCW,” said Mr Arias, a veteran Spanish diplomat.
The report said there were “reasonable reasons to believe” that at least one Syrian Air Force Mi8/17 helicopter dropped two yellow gas cylinders on the city during the government’s military offensive to retake Douma.
One of the cylinders hit the roof of a three-story residential building and ruptured, “rapidly releasing very high concentrations of the toxic gas chlorine, which spread rapidly through the building, killing 43 named people and affecting Dozens of people”.
The report added that a second cylinder burst through the roof of another building and entered the apartments below, but only partially ruptured, “causing minor impacts to those who were first on the scene”.
Syrian authorities denied the investigation team access to the site of the chlorine gas attack.
The country suspended voting rights in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2021 as punishment for reusing the toxic gas, the first such sanction imposed on a member state.
The painstaking investigation by the organization’s team aimed at identifying the perpetrators of the chemical weapons attack in Syria builds on earlier findings from the OPCW’s fact-finding mission that chlorine was used as a weapon in Douma.
Investigators also interviewed dozens of witnesses and studied blood and urine from survivors, as well as soil and building material samples, according to regulators.
They also carefully assessed and rejected other theories about what happened, including Syria’s claim that the attack was staged and that the bodies of people killed elsewhere in Syria were brought to Douma to appear to be victims of a gas attack.
The report found that the two chlorine gas cylinders were modified and filled at Dumayr air base, while the helicopters that dropped them were controlled by the Syrian military’s elite Tiger unit.
The OPCW team “considered a range of possible scenarios and tested their validity based on the evidence they collected and analyzed to conclude that the Syrian Arab Air Force was responsible for the attack,” the group said in a statement. perpetrators”.
The conflict that broke out in Syria more than a decade ago has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced half of the country’s pre-war population of 23 million.
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