JEDDAH: The UN revealed on Wednesday that the Syrian regime was behind the deadly chemical attack that killed dozens of people in Khan Sheikhun in April.
The UN said its war crimes investigators have evidence confirming that the regime was behind the sarin gas attack.
Its Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Syria said it had gathered an “extensive body of information” showing that the air force was behind the attack.
“All evidence available leads the Commission to conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe Syrian forces dropped an aerial bomb dispersing sarin in Khan Sheikhun,” AFP quoted the report as saying.
At least 83 people, a third of them children, were killed and nearly 300 wounded in the attack on Khan Sheikhun, a town in the opposition-held northern province of Idlib.
The regime denied involvement, claiming that it no longer possessed chemical weapons after a 2013 agreement under which it pledged to surrender its chemical arsenal.
A fact-finding mission by the UN’s chemical watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), concluded earlier this year that sarin gas was used in the attack, but did not assign blame. Wednesday’s report is the first from the UN to officially blame the regime for the attack.
The investigators determined that an Su-22 fighter bomber, which is only operated by the Syrian air force, conducted four airstrikes in Khan Sheikhun at around 6:45 a.m. on April 4.
“Photographs of weapon remnants depict a chemical aerial bomb of a type manufactured in the former Soviet Union,” the report said.
The investigators said they had found no evidence supporting Syrian and Russian claims that the chemicals had been released when an airstrike hit an opposition weapons depot.
The report, which covers the period from March 1 to July 7, also found that regime forces had carried out chemical attacks on at least three other occasions since March — in Idlib, Hamah and Eastern Ghouta — using weaponized chlorine.
The UN report was immediately welcomed by political analysts in the Arab world.
“Here’s the clinching evidence of the savagery unleashed by Bashar Assad against his own people,” Hamdan Al-Shehri, a Riyadh-based Saudi political analyst and international relations scholar, told Arab News.
He said the continuation of Assad’s rule is untenable. “He’s the main cause of the tragedy in Syria. He’s the one responsible for the killing and displacement of hundreds and thousands of Syrians. Yes, terrorists have also committed untold miseries on Syrians, but they’ve now been taken care of by the international community. Now it’s Assad’s turn.”
Al-Shehri said the UN report will make it easy for the international community to pile pressure on Assad.
“He’ll have to give up — and not just give up, he’ll now be tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for gassing his people. Justice will be done,” said Al-Shehri.
Oubai Shahbandar, a Syrian-American analyst and fellow at the New America Foundation’s International Security Program, described the UN findings as “bittersweet” because “they come at a time when the regime seems to have consolidated its position and faces little to no real outside pressure to be held to account for its massacres.”
Shahbandar said the findings are an important reminder that Assad maintains extremely lethal advanced chemical weapons, and the means to deploy them against population centers at short notice.
“The publication of these findings also embarrasses the Russian government, which has diligently blocked any resolution at the UN Security Council to hold Assad accountable for using these banned munitions of mass destruction,” he told Arab News.
Meanwhile, UN peace talks mediator Staffan de Mistura said Syria’s opposition must accept that they have not won the six-and-a-half year war against Assad.
“For the opposition, the message is very clear: If they were planning to win the war, facts are proving that is not the case. So now it’s time to win the peace,” he told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.
Asked if he was implying that Assad had won, he said pro-regime forces had avanced militarily, but nobody could actually claim to have won the war.
Guilty: UN says Assad hit Khan Sheikhun with sarin
Guilty: UN says Assad hit Khan Sheikhun with sarin
