Photo by Yiran Ding on Unsplash
Despite Syrian President Bashar Assad’s assurances that their chemical warfare stockpile had been destroyed in 2013, BBC News uncovered provable evidence that 106 separate chemical warfare incidents did indeed occur after that date. The dates of these gas attacks fall within the same window of time as Assad’s forces were taking back opposition-held regions.
Half of these gas attacks occurred from the air, and this points to military involvement since the opposition lacked the ability to use aircraft. (Sources include video, photographs, and eyewitnesses.) In most attacks, chlorine was the culprit, which evaporates quickly and leaves little evidence except on the victims. There was one attack that used sarin, and the chemical forensics linked it to part of the original pre-2014 stockpile allegedly destroyed.
This report looks to be based on good investigative journalism, with fact-checkers looking over the research and reports. But even with the world’s watchdogs, the evidence is still extremely hard to find. While this report pins the blame on Assad’s government, it is all too easy for them to lie to professional people monitoring and attempting to prevent these gas attacks.
In light of this BBC report, I believe that Bashar Assad used chemical warfare against his citizens, sending 100,000’s of them fleeing and causing untold suffering and death because of this. Yet there’s no nation that doesn’t have some fashion of causing it’s underprivileged or marginalized citizens irreparable harm, including USA.
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