Following allegations from Britain, France, Israel, and Qatar that the Syrian regime had deployed chemical weapons in Aleppo and Damascus, the Obama administration yesterday confirmed that U.S. intelligence, "with varying degrees of confidence," shared the same view. In a letter sent to Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, the White House's Congressional liaison Miguel Rodriguez added that this assessment was "based in part on physiological samples" and that the agent used was most likely sarin. Rodriguez further stipulated that any such use would "very likely having originated with the Assad regime," although how victims may have been exposed to the deadly nerve agent remains undetermined. According to The Financial Times, two different sets of blood samples were analyzed, one by American authorities, the other by Britain's Defence Science Technology Laboratory. Perhaps reacting to the initial skepticism of administration officials, anonymously quoted in a New York Times article that threw cold water on the IDF's foremost intelligence analyst's claims of sarin use, Israel's deputy defense minister Danny Danon today told CNN today: "I will not go into specifics, but I can tell you very clear [sic] that we know that Syria has used chemical weapons."
The attacks almost certainly being independently or jointly investigated by all five foreign governments are the two that occurred last month in Aleppo's Khan al-Asal and in Oteibeh, a town in the East Ghouta suburb of Damascus. The Assad regime has alleged that there was indeed a chemical agent deployed in Khan al-Asal but insists that it was the rebels - or "terrorists" - who deployed it, firing from Kafer Da'al, about 50 kilometers north. The 25 dead and 110 injured in this attack were mainly attendees of a pro-Assad rally, which the regime has predictably used as propaganda point to implicate the opposition. However, the rebels do not possess rockets that can travel 50 kilometers, much less any outfitted with chemical warheads. Thus far, the only chemical facility to have been seized by the opposition - the al-Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, to be exact - was the Syrian-Saudi Chemicals Company in Aleppo, which manufactures chlorine.
What probably happened in Khan al-Assal was that the regime aimed at an opposition stronghold in Aleppo and missed, hitting its own loyalists by mistake. The rocket evidently landed about a kilometer away from the army's Infantry Training Academy, which was too embarrassing a friendly-fire mishap not to spin on state television. Alternatively, rebels have long held that the regime would use chemical weapons in Aleppo and blame them for it. Part of Assad's PR campaign has of course been to portray the entirety of the opposition as extremists or foreign agents, and his struggle for survival as inextricable from the global war on terror - a campaign that now includes parading so-called jihadists who dream of the caliphate and more attacks on U.S. soil before American news reporters.
Syria had requested that the U.N. investigate this site but refused to allow it to inspect Oteibeh. Russia has predictably backed such forensic obstruction, which should, but probably won't, change American policymakers' minds about how these latest disclosures will shame or pressure the Kremlin into abandoning its wholesale support for Damascus at the Security Council.
At the time of the Oteibeh attack, the Syrian Support Group said that a rocket outfitted with Echothiophate, an organophosphate, had been fired from al-Qatifa into Oteibeh, killing between 60 and 70. Victims suffering from convulsions, fascicular contractions, bradycardia, and severe hypotension - all symptoms consonant with exposure to organophosphates or sarin gas - were treated with Atropine, as these videos demonstrate. To date, the regime has not acknowledged the use of chemical agents in Oteibeh.
