SyriaUN inspectors' repot on gas attack points to Assad’s elite military units
Russia may say publicly that it does not know who launched the deadly 21 August gas attack on two Damascus neighborhoods, but the Russians must have had an inkling: Russia’s UN ambassador agreed to have an international team of weapon inspectors sent to Syria to investigate the 21 August attack on one condition: the inspectors’ mandate was narrowed to verifying that chemical weapons were used, but specifically prohibited the inspectors from assigning responsibility to the attack. Russia’s effort to shield Assad has resulted in a report, submitted Monday to the UN Security Council, which does not explicitly name the Syrian regime as the party launching the attack, but details buried in the report point directly at elite military formations loyal to Assad.
Russia, President Bashar al-Assad’s staunchest supporter, publicly said that as far as it knows, it may have been the rebels, rather than the Assad regime, which used the chemical weapons which killed 1,400 people on 21 August.
Russia’s actions, however, tell us that they do know who launched that chemical attack: Russia’s UN ambassador agreed to have an international team of weapon inspectors sent to Syria to investigate the 21 August attack on one condition: the inspectors’ mandate was narrowed to verifying that chemical weapons were used, but specifically prohibited the inspectors from assigning responsibility to the attack.
Russia’s effort to shield Assad has resulted in a report, submitted Monday to the UN Security Council, which does not explicitly name the Syrian regime as the party launching the 21 August attack, but as the New York Times reports, details buried in the report point directly at elite military formations loyal to Assad.
Some of the inspection team’s strongest findings suggest the Syrian government gassed its own people.
The inspectors pointed to the precise compass directions of flight for two rocket strikes which lead back toward the government’s elite redoubt in Damascus, Mount Qasioun, which overlooks and protects neighborhoods Assad’s presidential palace.
Syria’s Republican Guard and the army’s powerful Fourth Division operate from bases on Mount Qasioun.
“It is the center of gravity of the regime,” Elias Hanna, a retired general in the Lebanese Army and a lecturer on strategy and geopolitics at the American University of Beirut, told the Times. “It is the core of the regime.”
(In an article published 27 August, HSNW quoted Israeli intelligence sources who identified the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, a division under the command of the Syrian president’s brother, Maher Assad, as responsible for the chemical attack [“Israel offers proof of Assad regime’s responsibility for chemical weapons attack,” HSNW, 27 August 2013]).
The Times notes that in presenting the data concerning two rocket strikes, “the report provides a stronger indication than the public statements of intelligence services of the United States, France or Britain that the Syrian military not only carried out the attack, but apparently did so brazenly, firing from the same neighborhoods or ridges from which it has been firing high-explosive conventional munitions for much of the war.”
