Source: Flickr/Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This is the second in a series of articles examining the sarin attack on Ghouta, Damascus, Syria on August 21, 2013. See the first part here.
On August 21, 2013, the videos surged onto YouTube. Accounts flooded social media faster than international media could make sense of them. Something horrible had happened in East Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, Syria.
Ghouta was controlled by the slipshod opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Arab Army was situated nearby. Accusations had flown back and forth for months about a series of attacks in other parts of the country. The two-and-a-half-year-old civil war may have taken its darkest possible turn. The United Nations had just dispatched a team to learn the truth.
And now—conveniently—here was a moving, writhing, screaming refutation of Assad’s denials. Yes, each victim seemed to be saying—our president attacked us with sarin gas.
Test rabbit at U.S. sarin research facility. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, sarin gas was created by accident in 1938 by a team of German scientists researching pesticides. The word “sarin” is actually an acronym for the names of each member of the team—Schrader, Ambros, Rüdiger, and Van der Linde.
The Guardian says the gas causes a “massive disruption to the nervous system.” That does not even begin to do it justice.
In the Atlantic, James Hamblin goes into further, grisly detail about how exactly sarin accomplishes this “disruption”:
After a neurotransmitter has done its job, delivered its message, an enzyme usually comes along and demolishes it. But nerve agents block those enzymes. The enzyme can’t break down the neurotransmitter, so the neurotransmitter stays around and keeps giving its message. If that message was, say, to release a little water onto your eye because your eye was dry, now the repeated message becomes “make your eyes water uncontrollably.”
When applied to the nervous system, the results are horrifying:
First, our smooth muscles and secretions go crazy. The nerves to those areas keep firing, keep telling them to go. The nose runs, the eyes cry, the mouth drools and vomits, and bowels and bladder evacuate themselves.
Hence the videos out of Ghouta of patients spasming uncontrollably. Their very reflexes are betraying them. Next, Hamblin says, come “convulsions, paralysis, and death.”
In the decades following World War II, sarin was a part of many countries’ arsenals, including the United States. Beyond a few high-profile accidents, it was not often used. In 1988, then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used sarin gas against the Kurdish city of Halabja. He killed around 5,000 people, according to France24.
Source: Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
In 1993, 162 countries signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, better know as the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Most countries set about destroying their sarin stockpiles. But sarin was far from eradicated. In 1995, Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese religious sect the Council on Foreign Relations describes as “obsessed with the apocalypse,” released sarin onto the Tokyo subway. They killed 12 people and injured many more.
Syria did not sign the CWC in 1993. When the civil war began in 2011, the international community was skittish, and for reasons beyond the obvious concerns about regional stability. Although the United States balked at openly assisting the opposition to Assad, President Barack Obama still delivered his now-infamous “red line” warning about the use of chemical weapons. Surely, Assad—even with the staunch backing of a newly-assertive Russia—would never dare step across such a line.
Source: Flickr/Ninian Reid.
As a reporter for the Voice of Russia’s Washington, DC bureau, it was left to me to make sense out of Ghouta.
I called Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of the Syrian American Medical Society, an opposition-allied nonprofit that provides medical care within Syria. He claimed to have spoken to doctors on the ground in Ghouta who were treating victims that very day.
“They had respiratory symptoms, with increased secretions, and tightness of the chest,” he told me. “They had respiratory failure, they had convulsions, loss of consciousness and also eye problems. They had constricted pupils or pinpoint pupils. These symptoms, this conflation of symptoms, are consistent with exposure to nerve gas or sarin gas.”
The next day, I spoke to Khalid Saleh, the spokesperson for the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (better known as the Syrian National Coalition), the primary organ of the political opposition.
“We have at this point a very well documented attack: 34 missiles carrying some sort of a chemical weapon were used against innocent civilians,” Saleh said. “We were able today to locate and identify the division within the Assad army that was actually responsible for carrying out the attack even the name of the person, the general, who gave the order.”
While numbers and specifics varied widely, Western powers for the most part agreed.
On August 26, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a statement in the State Department’s Briefing Room in Washington.
“What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world,” Kerry said. “It defies any code of morality. Let me be clear: The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders, by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard it is inexcusable, and despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured, it is undeniable.”
Kerry did not name names. He did not have to.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry released two statements soon after the attack. They brought up the very recent arrival of the UN team and also claimed the attack was reported on social media before it actually happened. The attack, they said, was a “provocative act” by the opposition to encourage U.S. intervention against Assad.
Kerry still pulled his punches, settling for drawing a moral and ethical line.
“The President will be making an informed decision about how to respond to this indiscriminate use of chemical weapons. But make no mistake: President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people,” he said.
Secretary of State John Kerry. Source: State TV.
Just four days later, on August 30, Kerry spoke again, this time in the much more formal Treaty Room. The government’s decision was made.
We know that for three days before the attack the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons personnel were on the ground in the area making preparations. And we know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons. We know that these were specific instructions. We know where the rockets were launched from and at what time. We know where they landed and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition-controlled or contested neighborhoods
And we know, as does the world, that just 90 minutes later all hell broke loose in the social media. With our own eyes we have seen the thousands of reports from 11 separate sites in the Damascus suburbs. All of them show and report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness and death.
This time, he called out the Assad regime directly.
“Their response needed to be unrestricted and immediate access,” Kerry said. “Instead, for five days, the Syrian regime refused to allow the UN investigators access to the site of the attack that would allegedly exonerate them. Instead, it attacked the area further, shelling it and systematically destroying evidence. That is not the behavior of a government that has nothing to hide.”
That same day, the government released this intelligence assessment. It said the government had “high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013. We further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the attack. These all-source assessments are based on human, signals, and geospatial intelligence as well as a significant body of open source reporting.”
This was the only information provided the public.
On September 3, Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, presenting the administration’s case for air strikes against the Assad regime. Besides being disrupted briefly by a protester, the hearing was mostly characterized by strong confidence in the intelligence all around.
“To my knowledge, I have no knowledge of any agency that was a dissenter or anybody who had, you know, an alternative theory,” Kerry said in response to a question from Senator Barbara Boxer.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee expressed similar faith in the intelligence, if not the rationale for strikes.
On September 10, still seeking the approval of Congress for military strikes, President Obama took it to a new level.
He knew he was dealing with a country weary of war.
“We cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the president said.
But his “red line” had still been crossed.
“The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits — a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war.”
As history as shown, strikes against Syria were not to be, but the consensus in the Western-dominated world of foreign affairs still seemed to point towards Assad.
On September 13, the UN released its first of two reports that would touch on the Ghouta attacks. While the reports stopped short of stating who was responsible, it did identify which munitions the team was able to identify at the sites, and to calculate the missiles’ most likely trajectories.
The general response to the reports was that they implicated Assad by strong inference.
America’s mainstream media—not-so-affectionately referred to as “the big boys” by independent journalist Seymour Hersh—seemed willing to make that inference. Even before Kerry or Obama openly blamed Assad, the Washington Post published a timeline based upon the U.S. government’s account. The New York Times said the UN report proved that, as U.S. intelligence sources apparently indicated, the Syrian army must have been responsible. Human Rights Watch also followed suit, going so far as to identify specifics: “the presumed flight paths of the rockets converge on a well-known military base of the Republican Guard 104th Brigade, situated only a few kilometers north of downtown Damascus and within firing range of the neighborhoods attacked by chemical weapons.”
The big boys and the slightly smaller boys were in agreement—Bashar al-Assad had committed a war crime by attacking his own people with sarin gas.
For too long, the United States had allowed the nightmares of Iraq and Afghanistan to make them forget the importance of protecting the weak and vulnerable.
But now we had a story that could bring us back.
Unfortunately, it was almost entirely untrue.
Next: Chinks in the narrative, and a war of words and wills.
