On April 7, 2018 reports began emerging of alleged chemical attacks on the city of Douma, the last rebel-held town in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta. Rescuers and medics say that more than 80 people have died.
Two weeks after the suspected chemical attack, the United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles targeting what the Pentagon said were three chemical weapons facilities in Syria, in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7. Reuters wrote on April 15:
In a conference call with reporters on Saturday, senior U.S. administration officials said they had a large volume of clear and compelling information, both of chemical weapons use and of President Bashar al-Assad’s culpability in the attack. “The information we have points to the use of both chlorine and sarin, both of which are chemical weapons,” one official said.
France concluded after technical analysis of open sources and “reliable intelligence” that a chemical attack on Douma on April 7 was carried out by Syrian government forces, a declassified intelligence report said on Saturday:
“On the intelligence collected by our services, and in the absence to date of chemical samples analyzed by our own laboratories, France considers, beyond possible doubt, a chemical attack was carried out against civilians at Douma … and that there is no plausible scenario other than that of an attack by Syrian armed forces,” the report said. “After examining the videos and images of victims published online, they (intelligence services) were able to conclude with a high degree of confidence that the vast majority are recent and not fabricated,” the report said.
On BBC.com, a report provides more details on what really happened on April 7:
Activists from the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), which records alleged violations of international law in Syria, reported two separate incidents of bombs believed to contain toxic substances being dropped by the Syrian Air Force […] At 19:45, more than 500 patients – most of them women and children – were brought to medical facilities with symptoms indicative of exposure to a chemical agent, according to the Syria Civil Defence and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a relief organisation that supports hospitals in rebel-held areas.
Read full article on this page.
Last week, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) published a document (The Fact-Finding Mission – FFM) regarding the chemical attack in Douma:
On arrival at Site 1, a large crowd gathered and the advice provided by the UNDSS was that the reconnaissance team should withdraw. At Site 2, the team came under small arms fire and an explosive was detonated. The reconnaissance team returned to Damascus […] This incident again highlights the highly volatile environment in which the FFM is having to work and the security risks our staff are facing. I should like to take
this opportunity to express my gratitude to States Parties for their continued support for the FFM, as they reiterated during the Council meeting on Monday. This is particularly
important for our staff taking part in such challenging missions.
We know the missions lead by the OPCW can be challenging and at risk for their staff, but we have been deceived by the organization regarding the chemical weapons used in Darfur, as reported by Amnesty International (read our news published on October, 2016).
We called out the OPCW on twitter about it:
https://twitter.com/MagkaSama/status/986282137803481088
We hope this time the mission by the OPCW will soon provide conclusive evidence nobody will deny, and that the international community will, at last, work together to prevent further chemical weapons attacks.
