Russia’s United Nations Ambassador Vitaly Churkin announced on Tuesday that he had just provided UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with a detailed 80 page report setting forth the results of an analysis of samples taken by Russian chemical weapons experts on-site in Syria.
The Russian team was investigating an alleged incident of chemical weapons use last March in Khan al-Assal in the Aleppo region, which resulted in 26 fatalities. The results, Ambassador Churkin said, backed the Syrian government’s charge that anti-government forces had launched a gas-laden projectile filled with non-industrial grade sarin.
The samples, according to Ambassador Churkin, were taken at the point of projectile impact by Russian experts in person. They were analyzed by a Russian laboratory said to have been certified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
“The results of the analysis clearly indicate that the ordnance used in Khan al-Assal was not industrially manufactured and was filled with sarin,” said the Russian ambassador. “The sarin technical specifications prove that it was not industrially manufactured either. The projectile involved is not a standard one for chemical use. Therefore, there is every reason to believe that it was the armed opposition fighters who used chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal.”
Ambassador Churkin mentioned specifically the “Basha’ir al-Nasr” brigade affiliated with the Free Syrian Army.
He said that the Russians would share their report with the governments of the United States and other Western countries, which had found evidence of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government but not by the Syrian opposition. However, he refused a request by reporters to make the report public. Thus, there is no way for non-governmental experts to assess the quality of the findings. Concerns over chain of custody of the samples and how long after the March incident the samples were taken remain unanswered. The same concerns apply even more so to evidence claimed by the United States and its allies as backing their contention of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons. That is because their evidence was apparently not taken by their own experts in person, but transmitted instead through third parties.
Meanwhile, the team of experts appointed by Ban Ki-moon, headed by Ake Sellstrom, has waited months to get on-site to perform their tests. The Syrian government has refused their entry into Syria unless they agreed to confine their investigation to the March incident in Khan al-Assal that the Syrian regime had originally asked the United Nations to examine. The Assad regime has repeatedly charged that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s original commitment to focus on this one incident got sidetracked by requests from other countries such as France and the United Kingdom to broaden the investigation in order to cover earlier alleged incidents of chemical weapons use by the government.
Bolstered now by the results of the Russian expert report, the Syrian government has just extended a formal invitation to Mr. Sellstrom and UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Angela Kane, to visit Damascus to discuss the scope and mechanisms for conducting the UN team’s own on-site investigation. Given the passage of time, however, the reliability of results from any on-site analysis of samples taken this late may be problematical.
The Syrian government, with the Russians’ backing, is looking to score some propaganda points as the party seeking the “truth” about whom is most responsible for chemical weapons use in Syria. Lost in the back-and-forth jousting is the fact that less than one fifth of one percent of the total number of fatalities in Syria – approaching 100,000 – is reportedly attributable to chemical weapons. Both sides are engaging in continuous brutality, which is spreading over Syria’s borders into Lebanon and elsewhere. Almost 2 million have fled to neighboring countries and a further 4 million have been internally displaced.
United Nations agencies such as the World Food Program have dealt admirably with the humanitarian crisis created by the conflict, for example by bravely feeding the hungry in the middle of a war zone. However, the UN is paralyzed in dealing with the geopolitical dimensions of the conflict that have polarized the five veto-bearing permanent members of the Security Council. All that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon can do is issue a plea for all parties in Syria to put down their weapons during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. Sadly, in perhaps the understatement of the year, the Secretary General said “I am aware that some may see this call as unrealistic.”
