American and European representatives to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague accused the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad of continuing to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people, Foreign Policy reported on Monday.
“Chemical weapons use is becoming routine in the Syrian civil war,” Rafael Foley, the deputy U.S. representative to the monitoring group, warned during the opening session of the OPCW’s annual meeting. “The Syrian regime has continued to use chemical weapons on its own people.”
Jacek Bylica, the European Union’s representative to the OPCW, emphasized that there are numerous “uncertainties regarding the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program, notably the gaps and contradictions contained in Syria’s declarations.”
Last week, Foley told the OPCW’s Executive Council that “the Syrian regime has continued to use chemical weapons on its own people despite its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention.”
The Assad regime has been accused of gassing Syrian civilians in the eastern suburbs of Damascus in August 2013, an attack that the U.S. government assessed killed 1,429 people, including at least 426 children. In March 2015, six civilians were killed in a chlorine attack in the town of Sarmin; a video showing doctors unsuccessfully attempting to save the lives of three children under the age of four moved members of the United Nations Security Council to tears. In the aftermath of the attack, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry castigated the Assad regime, which, he declared, “continues to terrorize the people of Syria through indiscriminate airstrikes, barrel bombings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, murder, and starvation.”
On Tuesday, the Syrian regime barrel bombed a hospital in Homs, killing seven people and wounding 47. The hospital was run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), whose director of operations said, “The bombing shows all the signs of a double-tap, where one area is bombed and then a second bombing hits the paramedic response team. This double-tap tactic shows a level of calculated destruction that can scarcely be imagined.”
While the regime’s chemical weapons stockpile was ostensibly destroyed under the terms a deal reached by the U.S. and Russia in September 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) this past July that Assad was still deploying the illicit weapons. The disarmament agreement’s failure was attributed to poor intelligence.
The CIA had been confident that Mr. Assad destroyed all of the chemical weapons it thought he possessed when the weapons-removal deal was struck. In recent weeks, the CIA concluded that the intelligence picture had changed and that there was a growing body of evidence Mr. Assad kept caches of banned chemicals, according to U.S. officials.
In response to the Journal‘s report, Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, questioned, “If this is the record of the international community in dismantling and monitoring the chemical and nuclear facilities in Syria, how exactly [will it] do better in monitoring the vast Iranian nuclear infrastructure?”
Iran, alongside Russia, is a staunch supporter of the Assad regime, and doubled down on that support last month when it demanded that Assad be allowed to run in any future presidential election in Syria. Thousands of Iranian troops, as well as Hezbollah, Iraqi, and Afghan fighters, are on the ground in Syria fighting alongside Assad. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also created the National Defense Forces (NDF), an umbrella organization incorporating pro-Assad militias responsible for human rights atrocities, in 2013. The NDF, which reportedly consists of some 100,000 fighters, has been instrumental in keeping Assad in power, as the Syrian army has been a spent, demoralized force facing “dissipation and disintegration.” More than 250,000 Syrians have died in the civil war, while over 11 million have been displaced from their homes.
[Photo: ABC News / YouTube ]