UN investigation of chemical weapons use in Ghouta

Background

Two days before the attack, a UN team headed by Åke Sellström arrived in Damascus with permission, from the Syrian government, to investigate earlier alleged chemical weapons use. On the day of the attack, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed "the need to investigate [the Ghouta incident as] soon as possible," hoping for consent from the Syrian government. The next day, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay urged government and opposition forces to allow investigation, and Ban requested the government provide immediate access. On 23 August, clashes between rebel and government forces continued in and around Ghouta, government shelling continued, and UN inspectors were denied access for a second day. United States officials told The Wall Street Journal that the White House "became convinced" that the Syrian government was trying to hide the evidence of chemical weapons use by shelling the sites and delaying their inspection. Ban called for a ceasefire to allow the inspectors to visit the attack sites. On 25 August the government agreed to cease hostilities with the presence of UN inspectors, and agreements between the UN, government and rebel factions were reached for five hours of cease-fire each day from 26 to 29 August.

Investigation

Early in the morning of 26 August several mortars hit central Damascus, including one that fell near the Four Seasons hotel the UN inspectors were staying in. Later in the day the UN team came under sniper fire en route to Moadamiyah in western Ghouta (in the south of Damascus), forcing them to return to their hotel and replace one of their vehicles before continuing their investigation four hours later. The attack prompted Ban to declare he would register a complaint to the Syrian government and opposition authorities. After returning to Moadamiyah the team visited clinics and makeshift field hospitals, collected samples and conducted interviews with witnesses, survivors and doctors. The inspectors spoke with 20 victims of the attacks and took blood and hair samples, soil samples, and samples from domestic animals. As a result of the delay caused by the sniper attack, the team's time in Moadamiyah was substantially shortened, with the scheduled expiry of the daily cease-fire leaving them around 90 minutes on the ground.

On 28 and 29 August the UN team visited Zamalka and Ein Tarma in eastern Ghouta, in the east of Damascus, for a total time of five and a half hours. On 30 August the team visited at a Syrian government military hospital in Mazzeh, and collected samples.

Report

The UN investigation into the chemical attacks in Ghouta was published on 16 September. The report stated that "the environmental, chemical and medical samples, we have collected, provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used in Ein Tarma, Moadamiyah and Zamalka in the Ghouta area of Damascus." The inspectors were able to identify several surface-to-surface rockets at the affected sites as 140mm BM-14 rockets originally manufactured in Russia and 330mm rockets probably manufactured in Syria. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the findings "beyond doubt and beyond the pale," and clear evidence of a war crime. "The results are overwhelming and indisputable ... A majority of the rockets or rocket fragments recovered were found to be carrying sarin." The report, which was "careful not to blame either side," said that during the mission's work in the rebel controlled Zamalka and Ein Tarma neighborhoods, "individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated." The areas were under rebel control, but the report did not elaborate on who the individuals were. The UN investigators were accompanied by a rebel leader:

A leader of the local opposition forces [...] was identified and requested to take 'custody' of the Mission [...] to ensure the security and movement of the Mission, to facilitate the [sic] access to the most critical cases/witnesses to be interviewed and sampled by the Mission and to control patients and crowd in order for the Mission to focus on its main activities.

An August Scientific American article had described difficulties that could arise when attempting to identify the manufacturer of sarin from soil or tissue samples. UN lead investigator Sellström told the UN Security Council that the quality of the sarin was higher than that used by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, implying a purity higher than the Iraqi chemical weapons program's 45–60%. (By comparison, Aum Shinrikyo used nearly pure sarin in the 1994 Matsumoto incident.) According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of kilograms of sarin were used in the attack, which it said suggested government responsibility, as opposition forces were not known to possess significant amounts of sarin.

The UN investigation noted that the azimuth of two of the rockets could be determined based on their position embedded into the ground and/or the pattern of craters they created as they impacted the ground at a low angle. It drew no conclusions from this.

Responses

Independent analysts concluded that the two azimuths determined by the report intersect deep in Syrian-government-controlled territory, near Mount Qasioun, noting that this region has been the target of Israeli airstrikes against chemical weapons-capable surface-to-surface rocket launchers. Based on analyses of the azimuths provided by the UN report, Human Rights Watch and The New York Times concluded the rockets that delivered the sarin were launched from areas under government control. Specifically, the inspectors listed the precise compass directions of flight for two rocket strikes and these pointed to the government's elite centre in Damascus, Mount Qasioun. The two azimuths were calculated from impact sites of two different rockets – a 140mm rocket and a 330mm one. Human Rights Watch conceded that while the 140mm rocket was known to have a maximum range (9.8 km) such that Mt Qasioun was just in range of the impact site 9.6 km away, the range of the other, a 330mm rocket, was unknown.

The Russian government dismissed the initial UN report after it was released, calling it "one-sided" and "distorted". On 17 September, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated his government's belief that the opposition carried out the attacks as a "provocation". The United Nations high representative for disarmament affairs, Angela Kane, stated that the inspection team would review Russia's objections.

A Russian defence expert Ruslan Pukhov, said that the code found by the UN investigators on the M-14 munition showed it had been produced in 1967 by the Sibselmash plant in Novosibirsk for a BM-14-17 multiple rocket launcher. He said that these weapons had been taken out of service by Syria and replaced with BM-21s. The second projectile identified by weapons inspectors, he thought, looked to be ‘home made’. Eliot Higgins has posted evidence of the Syrian National Defence Forces using the munition type linked to the August 21 attack however, and has concluded that 'it now seems undeniable that the Syrian military has been using this family of munitions for at least the past 10 months.' An Iranian chemical weapons expert, Abbas Foroutan, said in October 2013 that the UN should publish more details about the investigation than were provided in the report, including victims' pulse rates and blood pressure and their response to the atropine treatment, the victims' levels of acetylcholinesterase (sarin is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor), and more technical details on the lab testing process.

Further developments

The UN inspection team returned to the Damascus area to continue investigations into other alleged chemical attacks in late September 2013. A final report on Ghouta and six other alleged attacks (including three alleged to have occurred after the Ghouta attack) is expected to be released on early December 2013.

In the months immediately following the August attacks, and the situation they precipitated, "Syria declared to the OPCW 30 production, filling and storage facilities, eight mobile filling units and three chemical weapons-related facilities.They contained approximately 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, mostly in the form of raw precursors, 290 metric tons of loaded munitions and 1,230 unfilled munitions, OPCW documents showed."