Moderate rebels continue to battle for supremacy with islamist , Al Qaeda linked fighters....
(AP) Syrian rebel infighting kills 5 near Iraqi border
BEIRUT
Al-Qaida-affiliated rebels battled more moderate Syrian opposition fighters in a town along the Iraqi border on Saturday, killing at least five people in the latest outbreak of infighting among the forces opposed to President Bashar Assad's regime.
Clashes between rebel groups, particularly pitting al-Qaida-linked extremist factions against more moderate units, have grown increasingly common in recent months, undermining the opposition's primary goal of overthrowing Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday's fighting took place in the town of Boukamal between the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant against more mainstream rebel groups.
Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said the more moderate rebels used mosque loudspeakers Friday to demand the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant leave Boukamal. When it was clear Saturday the ISIL had no plans to decamp, the mainstream groups attacked, Abdul-Rahman said. Three mainstream rebels and two ISIL fighters were killed in the clashes, he said.
It was not immediately clear what spurred the rebel demands for ISIL to leave Boukamal.
After months of growing tensions, infighting among Syria's mosaic of rebel factions broke into the open in July. For a time, the clashes contributed to a sense that the rebellion was faltering, and threatened to fracture an opposition movement that has been plagued by divisions from the start.
The moderates once valued the expertise and resources that the Islamic extremist brigades brought to the battlefield, and rebel factions of all stripes enter into occasional alliances for specific operations. But many of the moderates now question whether such military assets are worth the trouble _ not to mention the added difficulty in persuading the West to arm them.
And FSA not happy about chemical weapon deal between the US and Russia ....
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/14/2013 18:47 -0400
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/09/14/FSA-chief-says-U-S-Russia-deal-is-a-blow-to-Syrian-uprising.html
Chemical weapon news items.....
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-14/us-russia-reach-deal-syria-chemical-weapons
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/14/2013 09:57 -0400
http://rt.com/news/lavrov-syria-kerry-chemical-861/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-chemical-attack-more-evidence-only-leads-to-more-questions/5349673
UN Human Rights Committee item....
SYRIAN REBEL INFIGHTING
KILLS 5 NEAR IRAQI
BORDER
AP 9/14/2013 3:16:36 PM
(AP) Syrian rebel infighting kills 5 near Iraqi border
BEIRUT
Al-Qaida-affiliated rebels battled more moderate Syrian opposition fighters in a town along the Iraqi border on Saturday, killing at least five people in the latest outbreak of infighting among the forces opposed to President Bashar Assad's regime.
Clashes between rebel groups, particularly pitting al-Qaida-linked extremist factions against more moderate units, have grown increasingly common in recent months, undermining the opposition's primary goal of overthrowing Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday's fighting took place in the town of Boukamal between the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant against more mainstream rebel groups.
Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said the more moderate rebels used mosque loudspeakers Friday to demand the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant leave Boukamal. When it was clear Saturday the ISIL had no plans to decamp, the mainstream groups attacked, Abdul-Rahman said. Three mainstream rebels and two ISIL fighters were killed in the clashes, he said.
It was not immediately clear what spurred the rebel demands for ISIL to leave Boukamal.
After months of growing tensions, infighting among Syria's mosaic of rebel factions broke into the open in July. For a time, the clashes contributed to a sense that the rebellion was faltering, and threatened to fracture an opposition movement that has been plagued by divisions from the start.
The moderates once valued the expertise and resources that the Islamic extremist brigades brought to the battlefield, and rebel factions of all stripes enter into occasional alliances for specific operations. But many of the moderates now question whether such military assets are worth the trouble _ not to mention the added difficulty in persuading the West to arm them.
And FSA not happy about chemical weapon deal between the US and Russia ....
Syrian Rebels Furious At U.S.-Russian Deal
With major deadlines now pushed off until next year and Assad appearing to come out smelling of (slightly tarnished) roses with his 'compromise' agreement with Russia (and the US) to join the chemical weapons treaty, not only is Israel now a major focus but the Syrian rebels - as one might expect - are not happy. As Reuters reports, the head of the opposition Syrian Supreme Military Council said on Saturday a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons was a blow to the two-and-a-half-year uprising to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.
Crucially, General Salim Idris notes that this allows Assad "to escape being held accountable," and, while unverified for now, Idris added, "we have told our friends that the regime has begun moving a part of its chemical weapons arsenal to Lebanon and Iraq. We told them do not be fooled." But another military council official, Qassim Saadeddine, was a little more aggressive: "Let the Kerry-Lavrov plan go to hell. We reject it and we will not protect the inspectors or let them enter Syria."
Via Reuters,
The head of the opposition Syrian Supreme Military Council said on Saturday a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons was a blow to the two-and-a-half-year uprising to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.General Selim Idris said the deal would allow Assad to escape being held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians in a poison gas attack on Damascus on Aug. 21. Assad has denied responsibility for the attack...."We have told our friends that the regime has begun moving a part of its chemical weapons arsenal to Lebanon and Iraq. We told them do not be fooled," Idris told reporters in Istanbul."All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people. A crime against humanity has been committed and there is not any mention of accountability."...But another military council official, Qassim Saadeddine, said: "Let the Kerry-Lavrov plan go to hell. We reject it and we will not protect the inspectors or let them enter Syria."
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/09/14/FSA-chief-says-U-S-Russia-deal-is-a-blow-to-Syrian-uprising.html
The head of the opposition Free Syrian Army on Saturday rejected an agreement between the United States and Russia to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons stock by mid-2014.
“We cannot accept any part of this initiative,” General Selim Idriss told reporters in Istanbul, saying it is a blow to the two-and-a-half year uprising aiming to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“We in the Free Syrian Army are unconcerned by the implementation of any part of the initiative... I and my brothers in arms will continue to fight until the regime falls,” he said in a statement carried by Agence-France-Presse.
Idriss said the deal would allow Assad to avoid being held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians in a poison gas attack on Damascus on Aug. 21. Assad has denied responsibility for purported attack.
The United States’ strike plans were put off after Russia proposed that Damascus put its chemical arms under international supervision, Assad agreed to the proposal.
Idriss spoke shortly after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the agreed time frame, after three days of talks in Geneva.
“Are we Syrians supposed to wait until mid-2014, to continue being killed every day and to accept [the deal] just because the chemical arms will be destroyed in 2014,” asked Idriss.
“We respect our friends [in the international community], and we hope our friends understand our position... We cannot accept this initiative because it ignores... the massacre of our people.”
“We respect our friends [in the international community], and we hope our friends understand our position... We cannot accept this initiative because it ignores... the massacre of our people.”
Chemical weapon news items.....
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-14/us-russia-reach-deal-syria-chemical-weapons
U.S., Russia Reach Deal On Syria Chemical Weapons
Following two days of negotiations in Geneva, this morning John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov announced they have reached an agreement for a framework on how Syria would destroy its chemical weapons, and would also seek a UN Security Council resolution that would authorize sanctions, but not military action as per Russia's demand, if Assad failed to comply. The diplomats announced on the third day of intense negotiations in Geneva that some elements of the deal include a timetable and how Syria must comply. At a news conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva, Kerry said the inspectors must be on the ground by November and destruction or removal of the chemical weapons must be completed by mid-2014.
Ironically, that means that all that "proof" about Assad's inhuman chemical attacks which demand an immediate deterrence response, apparently does not actually exist despite countless lies to the contrary. The good news is that Colin Powell's legacy of a war of aggression based on a lie has been halted, if only for now.
AP reports that Kerry said they had agreed on grounds under which they might request a Security Council "Chapter 7" resolution, which could include military and non-military sanctions. Lavrov called the agreements a "decision based on consensus and compromise and professionalism." But with Russia almost certain to veto any resolution that included military action, Lavrov indicated the limits of using that potential action. "Any violations of procedures ... would be looked at by the Security Council and if they are approved, the Security Council would take the required measures, concrete measures," Lavrov said.
In other words, the military option has been de-escalated, and now it will be merely a diplomatic depabe, made obsolete in the corridors of the world's most theatrically irrelevant organization, the United Nations.
"Nothing is said about the use of force or about any automatic sanctions. All violations should be approved by the Security Council," he added.Kerry said any violations will result in "measures" from the Security Council, while Lavrov said the violations must be sent to the Security Council from the board of the chemical weapons convention before sanctions — short of the use of force — would be considered."We have committed to a standard that says, verify and verify," he said.Kerry said the pair and their teams of experts had reached "a shared assessment" of Syria's weapons stockpile and that Syria must destroy all of its weapons.The negotiations between the United States and Russia on securing Syria's chemical weapons also are considered key to a resumption of peace talks to end the 2 ½-year Syrian civil war.The agreement on a Russian proposal to inventory, isolate and eventually destroy Syria's chemical weapons stocks comes as the Obama administration warned that there is a timetable for a diplomatic resolution of the weapons issue.A major sticking point was how to account for Syria's chemical weapons inventory, but in marathon sessions into early morning hours the U.S. and Russia succeeded in narrowing their differences over what each country believes to be the size of the Syrian stockpiles.
And like that the Saudi attempt to enflame the region in a destabilizing conflict has been foiled again, but more importantly Gazpromia has foiled Qatar one more time.
So now we sit back, and await to see where the next false flag attack will strike. Keep a close eye on Iraq. And, of course as usual, Iran and Israel.
http://rt.com/news/lavrov-syria-kerry-chemical-861/
Russia and the United States reached a deal on a framework that will see the destruction or removal of Syria’s chemical weapons by mid- 2014. Under the plan, the Assad government has one week to hand over an inventory of its chemical weapons arsenal.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry announced the plan on putting an end to Syria’s chemical weapons program following their third day of negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Kerry outlined several points of the plan, which would see the “rapid assumption of control by the international community” of Syria’s chemical weapons. He further stressed US-Russia commitment to the complete destruction of not only of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, but also its production and refinement capabilities.
Syria will also become a party to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which outlaws their production and use.
Damascus must submit within a week’s time – “and not 30 days” – a complete inventory of related arms,“including names, types, and quantities of its chemical weapons agents, types of munitions, and location and form of storage, production and research and development facilities."
The Syrian government should provide the OPCW, the UN and other supporting personnel “with the immediate and unfettered right to inspect any and all sites in Syria.” Lavrov later said that security for all international inspectors on the ground should be provided for not only by the government, but opposition forces as well.
It remains undecided who will actually be tasked with destroying the stock, although their destruction“outside of Syria" and under “OPWC supervision” would prove to be optimal.
On the timetable, Kerry said UN inspectors must be on the ground no later than November, while the destruction of chemical weapons must be completed by the middle of 2014.
"Providing this framework is fully implemented it can end the threat these weapons pose not only to the Syrian people but also their neighbors," Kerry said adding that Russian and US teams of experts had reached "a shared assessment" of the existing stockpile and that Syria must destroy all of its weapons. It was possible that the Syrian rebels have some chemical weapons, he acknowledged.
If Damascus fails to comply with the plan, a response in accordance with UN Charter Chapter 7 will follow, Kerry said, in a reference to the use of military force. The chapter provides for "action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security" in the event other measures fail.
But Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said the agreement did not include any potential use of force against Syria. He however said that deviations from the plan, including attacks on UN inspectors, would be brought to the UN Security Council, which would decide on further action.
There is no prior agreement about what form the Security Council’s measures might take if Syria does not comply, Kerry said.
Kick starting Geneva II
Meanwhile, both sides reiterated previously stated intentions to meet with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, on the margins of the UN General Assembly on September 28.
Speaking alongside Kerry and Lavrov in Geneva on Friday, Brahimi said ongoing work to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control was a necessary step for convening the Geneva II conference. The conference, which is intended to hammer out a political solution to the brutal civil war which has embroiled Syria for over two years, could be held in October, Lavrov told reporters.
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to present a report to the Security Council which sources say contains overwhelming evidence that “chemical weapons were used” in an August 21 attack in a Damascus Suburb which killed between 355 and 1,729 people.
The government of Bashar Assad strongly denied government forces were responsible for the attack, while the West overwhelmingly blamed Damascus, prompting US Barack Obama’s threat of military action.
Obama has threatened to strike Syria unilaterally, prompting Russia’s Saturday’s joint proposal which will see Syria’s chemical weapons brought under international control.
Although President Assad immediately acquiesced to the Russian-backed plan, rebel forces have resisted efforts which have staved off Western intervention in the country.
On Saturday, the Free Syrian Army rejected a US-Russian deal as a stalling tactic and vowed to continue fighting to topple the Assad government.
"The Russian-American initiative does not concern us. It only seeks to gain time," said Salim Idriss, the chief of the FSA command, said.
"We completely ignore this initiative and will continue to fight to bring down the regime," he told a press conference Saturday in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
http://rt.com/op-edge/obama-hamlet-performance-syria-839/
'To bomb or not to bomb?' Obama's Hamlet omnishambles
Published time: September 14, 2013 01:11
On the face of it, Barack Obama’s agonized “To bomb or not to bomb?” speech to the American people looked a class act, lacking only Hamlet’s skull and a Shakespearean costume. The reality? He’s lost the argument for strikes on Syria, and he knows it.
The decision by the US president to postpone a vote in Congress on military intervention in Syria led to some commentators, such as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, dubbing Obama a modern-day “Hamlet” for being indecisive, and thus weakening American power around the world. “To go through this Hamlet-like performance on the world stage can’t be good for American power and prestige,” Zakaria said in an interview on CNN’s sister channel in India, IBN.
In fact, when making the case for a limited strike against Syria President Bashar Assad’s regime, to“degrade” his ability to launch any future chemical weapons attacks, both the US president’s moral rhetoric and realpolitik were hopelessly flawed.
Obama’s ‘sea of troubles’
First, the moral argument: far from being able to claim, as Obama did, that the US “has worked with allies to provide humanitarian support, to help the moderate opposition, and to shape a political settlement,” his administration has in fact “stood idly by” for two years while 100,000 people have been killed, more than 4 million people have been made homeless refugees and the country has been sucked into a sectarian bloodbath.
While Obama played up the rhetoric with harrowing descriptions of the video footage from the August 21 chemical gas attack in a Damascus suburb that killed up to 1,400 men, women and children, it’s disingenuous to claim, as he did, that “the situation profoundly changed” with that attack. The reality is much different: While at the beginning of the civil war, triggered by a popular uprising against Assad’s regime in the Arab Spring of 2011, it was Assad’s forces brutally targeting civilians, the rebels (funded and armed from the Gulf states, in particular) soon caught up in atrocities.
The pro- and anti-Assad armed forces that are savaging the country, threatening to make this sectarian conflict even worse than Bosnia or Iraq, in reality only have the support of small sections of the population – about 10 percent on either side. The remaining 80 percent or so of ordinary Syrians support neither side in the conflict, and simply want an end to the suffering.
And as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out in an Op-Ed for The New York Times on Thursday, calling for Obama’s administration to exercise caution in Syria, it’s not a war being fought for any principle, but simply along ethnic and religious lines, and to avenge sectarian killing.
“Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multi-religious country,” Putin wrote. “There are few champions of democracy in Syria.”
Chemical weapons ‘still part of modern warfare’
But the moral flaws in Obama’s arguments against chemical weapons go much deeper. Yes, he is correct in saying all except seven countries around the world have ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). But chemical and biological agents are still part and parcel of modern warfare, contrary to the simplistic picture he and his Secretary of State John Kerry, have painted.
Those seven countries include not just Syria, but also staunch US ally Israel, not to mention military-run Egypt. As a recently discovered CIA document shows, the US believes Israel to have had its own active chemical weapons program, including sarin and other nerve gases, since the 1960s.
In his White House speech, Obama said how, in “World War I, American GIs were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe,” but he failed to mention how the US itself was manufacturing massive quantities of mustard gas as soon as it joined the war, and how it would have unleashed the biggest attacks of the war on German soldiers if the armistice had not been signed in November 1918.
In Obama’s version, “the civilized world has spent a century working to ban” chemical weapons, culminating in the CWC. This specifies that signatory countries must not only not use chemical and biological weapons in warfare, but also cease production of these weapons and destroy all their stockpiles. But the dirty truth about chemical warfare – ever since its use in World War I by first the Germans, then the British and the Americans – is that if one side has chemical weapons, the very first reaction of rival armies is to produce their own, deadlier weapons in even greater quantities, and to retaliate in kind. For more on the genesis and use of chemical warfare, see Robert Harris’s and Jeremy Paxman’s comprehensive 1982 book, “A Higher Form of Killing”:
Although the vast majority of the world’s nations have signed up to the CWC, the US, Russia and China are among those countries who failed to complete the destruction of their chemical weapons stocks by the deadline of April 2012. (The US still has two active chemical weapons depots, in Colorado and Kentucky, for example, and is due to destroy its last stockpiles as late as 2021.)
From Agent Orange to white phosphorous
Obama’s rendering of the US’s own chemical weapons history is also highly selective, not to say downright suspect. Has he somehow forgotten the US military’s use of millions of gallons of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War?
The highly toxic cocktail of chemical herbicide, defoliant and jet fuel sprayed from warplanes left 400,000 Vietnamese people killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with defects. Even today, decades later, the Red Cross estimates up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange. (Just three days after the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Damascus, Britain’s Daily Mail posted a photo essay by New York photographer Brian Dricscoll, showing how Vietnamese children born in the 21st century are still suffering from horrific birth defects from its use.
Then there is the use of white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon similar to napalm, in the November 2004 attack by US forces on Fallujah in Iraq, in which some 6,000 civilians, including many women and children, were killed.
While white phosphorus is not on the CWC list of banned chemical weapons, its use in close proximity to civilians or civilian property (i.e. in urban areas, such as Fallujah) is considered a war crime.
While Obama opposed the Iraq war and criticized the Bush administration’s prosecution of it as a senator, after he became president he praised the US military for their conduct in the attack on Fallujah.
In a speech to US troops at Fort Bragg, Texas, in December 2011, Obama said:
“Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries - from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you - men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.”
The US is not alone in using white phosphorous against civilians in recent years, either. Israel also used the weapon in its attacks on Gaza in January 2009, which indiscriminately hit civilian facilities such as schools, homes and hospitals.
Kerry’s controversial record
As a side note to Obama’s flawed moral arguments on chemical weapons, we should also consider Kerry’s own. In several televised speeches and testimony to Congress since the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack, the Secretary of State has also focused largely on the moral arguments, rather than presenting definitive proof of the Assad regime’s guilt. Neither has he seriously considered the possibility that Syrian jihadist rebels were supplied with sarin gas by Saudi Arabian intelligence, an allegation reported by Dale Gavlak, an AP writer in Jordan.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph also reported that at a meeting this summer with President Putin, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, offered to strike a deal to keep world oil prices stable if the Kremlin would abandon Assad.
Yet Kerry’s record on the use of chemical weapons is also highly controversial. As writer Sean Thomas argues in the Daily Telegraph Kerry, a decorated former Vietnam vet, campaigned as a US senator for the right of US soldiers who suffered from the effects of Agent Orange to receive full compensation from the US government. Yet at the same time, Kerry is also “part of the US Establishment which refuses to compensate the Vietnamese for the same chemical poisoning by America’s Agent Orange,” Thomas says.
Kerry’s condemnation of Assad (whom he now compares to Hitler) is also something of a volte face.
In February 2009, as chairman of the Senate Foreign relations Committee, Kerry and his wife, billionaire heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry, enjoyed a lavish dinner with the Assads at one of Damascus’s top restaurants. It was just one of six meetings between Kerry and the Syrian dictator, and in January 2011 Kerry pushed for the US to reopen diplomatic relations with Damascus, even while the US officially considered Syria a “state that sponsors terrorism.”
For all of these reasons, the efforts by Obama and Kerry to convince the American people, the US Congress or international public opinion of the moral case for military strikes against Assad fall short.
Zakaria’s criticisms of Obama’s Hamlet-like indecisiveness are right, in a sense. Yet Obama’s real dilemma over Syria is not a personal moral one, but it epitomizes the existential crisis facing American foreign policy as a whole. If a “red line” is crossed in Syria, how will Washington keep Iran or anyone else in line on other issues? After all, even though Obama insisted twice in his Tuesday address that America is not “the world’s policeman,” in fact that is exactly the role that Obama’s sponsors in the Pentagon and Wall Street insist that he must play.
‘Spreading the conflict’
On the practical arguments for intervention, Obama has also failed to convince either centrist Democrats or rightwing Republicans in Congress, as both parties are split down the middle. Many Democrats, while seeking to support him, know all too well that their voters are tired of the US fighting yet another war of conquest.
Meanwhile, Republicans are split between the NeoCon interventionists led by John McCain, who want to see a full-blooded Iraq-style war with the aim of overthrowing Assad, and the isolationists such as Rand Paul. His Tea Party faction – like the anti-interventionist wing of the Democrats – fears that another Middle East war will not only cost American lives, but also strip federal government finances even further, leading to an even greater collapse in essential health, education and social services in many parts of the US.
In his White House speech, Obama tried to address the concerns of Congress about regional fallout, arguing that not striking Assad over chemical weapons would lead to fighting spilling “beyond Syria’s borders, these weapons could threaten allies like Turkey, Jordan, and Israel.”
But the problem is, a US strike would make things far worse. For a start, it would not mean the end of the Assad regime, and if anything it would prompt hard-liners in the Syrian Army and security services to step up, not reduce, their use of brutal methods of warfare such as chemical weapons. For another, it would increase sectarian barbarity on all sides, not bring the situation under control.
Fear of Jihadist regime
As Putin pointed out in his New York Times article, a US strike “will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa.”
However, Putin’s article does not give a full (or perhaps completely accurate) exposition of the Russian government position on Syria. While the Kremlin has offered varying degrees of support for Assad during the two years of the conflict, it has clearly done so to counteract Western influence and to prevent radical Jihadists coming to power. Many believe that Putin’s real position is that he sees an Assad regime, however bloody and brutal, as a lesser evil than these “bad guys” (to quote Kerry’s phrase).
Underpinning the Kremlin’s position, although it has tended to avoid saying it very loudly, is the fear that a jihadist Sunni regime in Damascus could help to destabilize already fragile Russia’s North Caucasus, which has seen two nasty conflicts in Chechnya in the last two decades. Russia has a growing Sunni Muslim population, and the last thing the Kremlin wants is for radical Islamist ideas to gain a bigger foothold on its southern flank.
Yes, it’s realpolitik, but this is the real reason why Putin has been reluctant to abandon Assad’s regime to its fate. Does this “lesser evil-ism” make Putin any less (or more) “noble” a Machiavellian prince than Obama? Apply the same test to Obama’s drone strikes in Pakistan, and it’s hard to see any heroes, more like 50 shades of gray.
‘Play-acting’ by Kerry and Obama
Contrary to White House and State Department spin, Obama’s decision to postpone the Congress vote on cruise missile strikes (at least for now) and “focus on diplomacy” was necessitated by Machiavellian realpolitik, not the “moral argument” against Assad.
And Kerry’s so-called “off-the-cuff” comments about giving Assad time to decommission chemical weapons were nothing of the sort – they were merely a face-saving exercise for Obama.
It’s not clear exactly when Obama realized the ruse was called for, but it seems it was sometime after he flew into St. Petersburg for the G8 summit. The penny may have dropped when he turned up for dinner with the other G20 leaders an hour late, after fielding presumably difficult calls with members of Congress. Then, realizing that domestic support for a strike could not be relied upon, during the dinner and further into a long night of discussions, he also realized that no effective coalition for military action could be cobbled together internationally.
In Kerry’s comments at the London press conference Monday morning, he appeared to be making a disparaging, throwaway remark (much in the same way that George W. Bush and his administration did about Saddam Hussein in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq):
"Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week - turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting, but he isn't about to do it and it can't be done."
As even the usually-supine, mainstream Western media started to realize that Kerry’s comments could open the way to a diplomatic solution to the crisis, State Department spokespeople were thrown into action – spinning the idea that Kerry had actually meant it “rhetorically.” Somehow, the plan was to throw the media off the scent, even if only for a day or two.
‘Obama-shambles’
Whatever the intention, the impression given was a typical “omnishambles,” as fictional spin doctor Malcolm Tucker’s character would have had it, perhaps in a more splenetic way, in the British TV comedy, “The Thick of It.” (Perhaps in this case, “Obama-shambles” would more accurately describe the angry reaction of the Washington elite to each new climb-down from the White House.)
The idea that somehow Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov could have “seized upon” Kerry’s comments, and – within a few hours – come up with a brand new plan for Assad to turn over Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles to international control was itself “seized upon” by the Western media. They seemed to swallow the idea hook, line and sinker – at least until after Obama’s speech Tuesday, and confirmation from Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, that the plan had in fact been discussed in some depth between Putin and Obama in St. Petersburg.
Then, as some of the US media started checking out the story, it became clear that the plan had been considered for a while – New York Times columnist Bill Keller wrote that a senior Obama administration official told him the plan was discussed by Kerry and Lavrov as far back as this spring.
And in Russia, Dmitry Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, said that the plan had in factoriginated with former US Senator Richard Lugar, who was involved in the Nunn-Lugar program to dismantle WMD in post-Soviet countries.
So in fact, the "Russian" plan currently being discussed in Geneva (if, in fact, we should call it a purely "Russian" plan) came about as a result of diplomatic discussions between Russia and the US. It may well be that, as a favor to be cashed in later, Putin allowed Obama to pass it off as a Kremlin idea, so that Obama wouldn't have to suffer the humiliation of unilaterally admitting that his strikes plan wouldn't get through Congress anyway.
The real tragedy of the Syrian conflict, however, is not that Obama dropped the skull, or fluffed Hamlet’s lines. No outside military intervention will stop the sectarian slaughter. Peace can only come from ordinary Syrians standing up in solidarity together against the sectarian barbarians – and ridding themselves of all brutal tyrants and warlords, from Assad to Al-Qaeda.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-chemical-attack-more-evidence-only-leads-to-more-questions/5349673
The paucity of revealed facts highlights the reality that little is really known about the actual attack. There is still no agreed upon number of fatalities, with unverified claims ranging from the US assertion of 1,429 fatalities to the French assertion that only 281 were killed. In other words, the French Intelligence number is about 20 percent that of the US assertion. Most Syrian opposition sources now put the number of fatalities at between 335 and 355, as does the non-governmental organization, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). This is about 25 percent of the US number. Either way, this is too huge a gap not to be explained and substantiated.
It is still not clear what type of agent killed the victims.
To-date, the US position in documents submitted to Congress is that the victims died as a result of “nerve agent exposure”. Orally, however, Secretary Kerry claimed the US has proof it was sarin. The French intelligence report also attributes the deaths to “chemical agents” without further identification. The most explicit finding to-date comes from the UK’s Defence Science Technology Laboratory. Soil and cloth samples “tested positive for the nerve gas sarin”. The sarin in the cloth was in liquid form that soaked into the cloth. As discussed below, this finding reinforces the conclusion that “kitchen sarin” was used. Hence, so much will depend on the UN’s findings when their tests are completed.
The claim that the agent used was a “military sarin” is problematic because military sarin accumulates (like a gaseous crystal) around the victims’ hair and loose threads in clothes. Since these molecules are detached and released anew by any movement, they would have thus killed or injured the first responders who touched the victims’ bodies without protective clothes, gloves and masks. However, opposition videos show the first responders moving corpses around without any ill effects. This strongly indicates that the agent in question was the slow acting “kitchen sarin”. Indeed, other descriptions of injuries treated by MSF – suffocation, foaming, vomiting and diarrhoea – agree with the effects of diluted, late-action drops of liquified sarin. The overall descriptions of the injuries and fatalities treated by MSF closely resemble the injuries treated by the Tokyo emergency authorities back on March 20, 1995. The Tokyo subway attack was committed with liquified “kitchen sarin”.The know how for this type of sarin came from North Korean Intelligence, and is known to have been transferred, along with samples, to Osama bin Laden in 1998. That the jihadist movement has these technologies was confirmed in jihadist labs captured in both Turkey and Iraq, as well as from the wealth of data recovered from al-Qaida in Afghanistan in 2001/2.
As well, it is not yet clear what weapons were used to disperse the chemical agent. The specifics of the weapon will provide the crucial evidence whether this was a military type agent of the kind available in the Syrian arsenal, or improvised, kitchen-style agent of the type known to be within the technical capabilities of the jihadist opposition.
Meanwhile, the mangled projectiles shown by the opposition, and which were tested by the UN inspectors, are not standard weapons of the Syrian Armed Forces. These projectiles have a very distinct ribbed-ring fins which are similar to projectiles used by the opposition in Aleppo, Damascus, and other fronts with both high-explosives and undefined materials. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) retrieved a video claiming to be of the attack, but is most likely of a daylight testing of the launcher. The truck-mounted launcher included a chemical sleeve that was supposed to absorb leaks from the improvised warheads and not harm the launch crew; hardly the precaution taken with a military weapon.
Moreover, the warheads used in Damascus were cylindrical tanks which cracked and permitted a Tokyo-style mixture of liquids, rather than the pressurized mix and vaporization at the molecular level by the force of core explosion in a standard Soviet-style chemical warhead. Had Syrian militarily-trained experts built these warheads, they would have used the upper pipe for the core-charge the explosion of which would have created a significantly more lethal vaporized cloud of the toxic agent. The mere fact that the pipeline remained empty suggests the work of amateurs found in the ranks of the improvised weapon makers of the jihadist opposition.
As well, the opposition also pointed to cracked plastic pieces which resembled shreds from large blue plastic tanks/bottles (like a water cooler’s huge bottles) fired by chemical launchers the opposition had bragged about in the past. These weapons are in agreement with the multitude of images of victims publicized by the opposition which did not show any injury due to shrapnel which would have come from Soviet-style chemical munitions of the type known to be in the Syrian military arsenal.
Most important, of course, is the question “Who could have done it?” given the available data. Significantly, evidence collected by numerous Arab sources on the ground in the greater Damascus area and recently smuggled out of Syria narrows the scope of potential perpetrators and the reason for the attack. This evidence points to specific commanders of Liwaa al-Islam and Jabhat al-Nusra known to be cooperating in the eastern Damascus theater.
On the night of August 20/21. 2013, and the early morning of August 21, 2013 – a day before the chemical attack – the jihadists’ Liberating the Capital Front, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, suffered a major defeat during Operation Shield of the Capital. Operation Shield of the Capital is the largest military operation of the Syrian Army in the Damascus region since the beginning of the conflict. The jihadists also amassed a huge force of over 25,000 fighters for their Front from 13 armed kitaeb [battalion-groupings].
The main units belonged to Jabhat al-Nusra and Liwaa al-Islam. The other kitaeb were Harun al-Rashid, Syouf al-Haqq, al-Mohajereen, al-Ansar, Abu Zhar al-Ghaffari, Issa Bin Mariam, Sultan Mohammad al-Fatih, Daraa al-Sham, the Jobar Martyrs, and Glory of the Caliphate. They included both Syrian and foreign volunteers. (The mere gathering of so many kitaeb for the battle of eastern Damascus refutes the assertion in the US and French intelligence reports that the opposition was incapable of conducting coordinated large-scale operations and therefore the chemical attack must have been launched by Assad’s forces.)
Around dawn on August 21, 2013, the Liberating the Capital Front suffered a strategic defeat in the Jobar entrance area.
The Jobar entrance was the opposition’s last staging areas with access to the heart of Damascus from where they could launch car-bombs and raids. The Jobar entrance is also the sole route for reinforcements and supplies coming from the Saudi-Jordanian-US intelligence base near Jordan’s major airbase and military facilities in al-Mafraq (from where the eastern route to Damascus starts) and distributed via the Ghouta area to the outlaying eastern suburbs of Damascus. The eastern route is so important that the efforts are supervised personally by Saudi Princes Bandar and Salman bin Sultan, and overseen by Col. Ahmad al-Naimeh, the commander of the opposition’s Military Council of the Southern Region and Horan.
The jihadists’ defeat on August 21 effectively sealed any hope of a future surge from Jordan by CIA-sponsored jihadist forces because the jihadists who, starting August 17/18, 2013, were attempting to use the western route to Damascus from the base in Ramtha, Jordan, had by now been encircled and defeated not far from the Golan border with Israel.
As the jihadist forces were collapsing, the Front commanders deployed an élite force to block at all cost the Syrian military’s access to the Jobar entrance area. The majority of the jihadists in this force were from Liwaa al-Islam and the rest from Jabhat al-Nusra. The commander of the force was a Saudi jihadist going by the nom de guerre Abu-Ayesha. (Abu-Ayesha was identified by a Ghouta resident called Abu Abdul-Moneim as the jihadist commander who had stored in a tunnel in Ghouta weapons some of which had “tube-like structure” and others looked like “huge gas bottles”. Abdul-Moneim’s son and 12 other fighters were killed inside the tunnel by a chemical leak from one of these weapons.)
According to military and strategic analyst Brig. Ali Maqsoud, the Liwaa al-Islam forces arrayed in Jobar included “the so-called ‘Chemical Weapons Front’ led by Zahran Alloush [the supreme leader of Liwaa al-Islam]. That group possesses primitive chemical weapons smuggled from al-Qaida in Iraq to Jobar, in the vicinity of Damascus.”
When the jihadist Front collapsed, the jihadist leaders decided that only a chemical strike could both stop the advance of the Syrian army and provoke a US military strike that would deliver a strategic victory for the jihadists. The chemical agents were then loaded on what Russian intelligence defined as “rockets [which] were manufactured domestically to carry chemicals. They were launched from an area controlled by Liwaa al-Islam.”
Maqsoud is convinced the chemical weapons strike was launched at the behest of Washington and on Washington’s orders. “In the end, we can say that this [post-strike US] escalatory rhetoric aims to achieve two things. The first is strengthening [the US] position as leader of the opposition and imposing conditions in preparation for the negotiating table. The second is changing the [power balance on the] ground and stopping the Syrian army’s advance,” Maqsoud told al-Safir of Lebanon.
The identification of Liwaa al-Islam under Zahran Alloush as the jihadist force most likely to have conducted the chemical attack raises major questions regarding the Saudi involvement and particularly that of Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Zahran Alloush is the son of a Saudi-based religious scholar named Sheikh Abdullah Muhammad Alloush. During the 1980s, he worked for then Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki al-Faisal in both Afghanistan and Yemen.
Zahran Alloush was involved with the neo-salafi/Wahhabi underground in Syria since the 1990s, was jailed by Syrian Mukhabarat, and released in mid-2011 as part of Bashar al-Assad’s amnesty aimed to placate Riyadh. Zahran Alloush immediately received funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence which enabled him to establish and run Liwaa al-Islam as a major jihadist force.
On July 18, 2012, Liwaa al-Islam conducted the major bombing of the headquarters of Syria’s national security council in Rawda Square, Damascus, assassinating, among others, Assaf Shawkat, Bashar’s brother-in-law and nominally the deputy Minister of Defense, Dawoud Rajiha, the Defense Minister, and Hassan Turkmani, former Defense Minister who was military adviser to then-Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa. In Spring 2013, Zahran Alloush helped the Saudis weaken the Qatari-sponsored jihadist forces in the Damascus area. In June 2013, he suddenly withdrew his forces in the middle of a major battle with the Syrian army, leaving the Qatari-sponsored First Brigade and Liwaa Jaish al-Muslimeen to be defeated and mauled.
Significantly, in late August 2013, the opposition insisted on having Zahran Alloush and Liwaa al-Islam secure and escort the international experts team when they collected evidence in the opposition-controlled parts of eastern Damascus. Zahran Alloush entrusted the task of actually controlling and monitoring the UN team to his close allied katiba, the Liwaa al-Baraa from Zamalka. Thus, the international experts’ team operated while in effective custody of those jihadists most likely responsible for the chemical attack.
According to several jihadist commanders, “Zahran Alloush receives his orders directly from the Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan” and Liwaa al-Islam is Saudi Arabia’s private army in Syria.
The Bandar aspect is important to understanding strategic-political aspects of the chemical strike.
No independent evidence ties Bandar to the actual chemical attack.
No independent evidence ties Bandar to the actual chemical attack.
Presently, there is no independent evidence connecting Bandar, or any other Saudi official, to the supply and use of chemical weapons in Damascus. There exist, though, the long-time connections between the various jihadist commanders and both Saudi intelligence and Bandar himself. However, Bandar’s threats in the meeting with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin cast a shadow on the question of Riyadh’s foreknowledge, and, given the uniquely close relations between Bandar and CIA Chief John Brennan, Washington’s foreknowledge as well.
On August 2, 2013, Prince Bandar had an unprecedented meeting with Pres. Putin at the Kremlin.
Their meeting covered a host of issues ranging from future energy economy to the situation in Egypt to what to do about Syria. Throughout, Bandar made a huge mistake – believing that Putin was just like the successive US senior officials Bandar has dealt with in the past – namely, that like the Americans, Putin would also be easy to bribe with flattery, weapons acquisition, and oil-related cash.
Putin was not.
Of significance to the issue of the chemical strike in Damascus was the exchange between Bandar and Putin regarding the future of Bashar al-Assad. Bandar wanted Putin to support the toppling of the Assad Administration and its replacement with a Saudi-sponsored opposition administration. Bandar promised that Russia’s interests in Syria would be preserved by the proposed Saudi-sponsored post-Assad government.
In this context Bandar sought to both allay Putin’s concerns regarding jihadist terrorism and to deliver a veiled threat. “As an example,” Bandar stated, “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move [also] in the direction of the Syrian territory without coordinating with us. These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria’s political future.”
Putin responded quietly. “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism that you mentioned.”
Toward the end of the meeting, Bandar again discussed the Syrian issue at length. He stressed that as far as Riyadh was concerned, there was no future for the Assad Administration. “The Syrian regime is finished as far as we and the majority of the Syrian people are concerned,” Bandar said, and they, the Syrian people, “will not allow President Bashar al-Assad to remain at the helm.”
Putin responded that Moscow’s “stance on Assad will never change. We believe that the Syrian regime is the best speaker on behalf of the Syrian people, and not those liver eaters.” Again, Bandar resorted to threats. He warned Putin that their dispute over the future of Syria led him, Bandar, to conclude that “there is no escape from the [US-led] military option, because it is the only currently available choice given that the political settlement ended in stalemate”. Bandar added that Riyadh saw no future for the negotiating process.
Bandar expected such a military intervention to soon commence.
Did he have any foreknowledge of a provocation to come? Significantly, Bandar insisted throughout his visit to Moscow that his initiative and message were coordinated with the highest authorities in Obama’s Washington. “I have spoken with the Americans before the visit, and they pledged to commit to any understandings that we may reach, especially if we agree on the approach to the Syrian issue,” Bandar assured Putin.
Did the Obama White House know in advance about the Saudi claim to controlling jihadist terrorism in both Russia and Syria? Did the Obama White House know about Bandar’s anticipation of an US-led military intervention?
Several Arab leaders, as well as senior intelligence and defense officials from the Arabian Peninsula are now convinced that the chemical strike was aimed to provoke a US-led military intervention which would in turn lead to the toppling of Bashar al-Assad and the empowerment of an Islamist government in Damascus.
These senior intelligence and defense officials have privately expressed anger that the US has not [yet] struck at Syria, as was so widely anticipated in the Arab world. These notables point out that in late Spring, the top leaders of the Syrian opposition and its regional sponsors impressed on the highest authorities in Washington and other Western capitals the gravity of the situation. The opposition and sponsors warned that unless there was a major military intervention during the Summer, the struggle for Syria would be lost come Autumn. The leaders of the opposition and their sponsors now insist that they were assured in these discussions that the US and key West European powers were eager to provide such help and intervene in order to topple the Assad Administration and empower the opposition in Damascus.
Given the political climate in the US and the West, the Arab leaders say that they were told, it was imperative for US and Western leaders to have a clear casus belli of an absolute humanitarian character. Recently (but before the chemical attack), the opposition and sponsors were asked for lists of targets to be hit by US-led Western bombing should there be a Western intervention. The opposition provided such target lists, convinced that their bombing was imminent. The leaders of the opposition and their sponsors now feel cheated, for there had just been an humanitarian catastrophe in Damascus with all the characteristics of the sought-after casus belli, and yet, there were no US and Western bombers in the skies over Damascus!
Significantly, most of these Arab leaders and officials are not in the know. They don’t pretend to have any specific knowledge of what happened in Damascus beyond the coverage in the Arab media. They complain so bitterly on the basis of their comprehension of how things should have been done given the overall strategic circumstances. And for them, such a self-inflicted carnage is the most obvious thing to do if that was what Washington and other Western capitals needed in order to have a viable casus belli for an intervention.
Meanwhile, the US case against the Assad Administration continued to crumble.
“No direct link to Pres. Bashar al-Assad or his inner-circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some US sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward,” observed Reuters’ Mark Hosenball.
A closer study of the much-touted electronic intercepts proves that Assad and his inner-circle were stunned by the news of the chemical attack. When the first reports of the chemical attack surfaced, a very senior Syrian military officer called in panic the artillery commander of the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army which is under the direct command of Maher al-Assad.
The senior officer wanted to know if the brigade had fired any chemical munitions in contravention of the explicit orders of the top leadership not to do so. The artillery commander flatly denied firing any rocket, missile, or artillery. He added that he had already checked and confirmed that all his munitions were accounted for, and invited the general staff to send officers to verify on their own that all brigade’s munitions were in safe storage. The senior officers took the commander to task and he was interrogated for three days as a thorough inventory of the munitions was carried out. This artillery officer was returned to duty as it was confirmed beyond doubt that no munitions were missing. (Since there was no other chemical-capable unit in the area, the claim of rogue officers should identify from where and how they had obtained chemical munitions.)
The reaction of the Assad inner-circle was in agreement with earlier observations by German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
The BND reported that since the beginning of Spring 2013, Syrian brigade and division commanders had repeatedly asked the Presidency for permission to use chemical weapons against jihadist forces besieging them. The Presidency had always denied permission in strong and uncompromising terms. The BND has no indication, let alone proof, that this consistent policy changed on or before August 21. 2013.
This is also the opinion of a very senior Iranian official in Beirut. When the news of the chemical attack first broke, a very senior HizbAllah official called the Iranian for advice. The BND intercepted the call. The HizbAllah official wondered whether “Assad had lost his temper and committed a huge mistake by giving the order for the poison gas use”. The Iranian senior official assured his HizbAllah counterpart that there was no change to Assad’s “long-standing steadfast policy of not using these [chemical] weapons”.
One of the main reasons for Washington’s accusatory finger at the Syrian military was the assertion that the chemical attack took place in the context of a Syrian military effort to recapture this part of the Damascus area. Having met stiff resistance and under immense pressure to decide the battle swiftly, Washington’s explanation goes, the Syrian military used chemical weapons in order to break the opposition.
However, the Syrian Armed Forces have a long history of training by the Soviet Armed Forces and access to Soviet-era weaponry, both chemical agents and means of dispersal. Among these are huge quantities of the vastly more lethal VX and grenade-size aerosols optimized for dense urban environment. Syrian commando was supplied with, and trained on, these systems starting the late-1970s when preparing to fight the jihadist insurrection in some of Syria’s main cities. Hence, had the Syrian military wanted to clear the said areas with the use of chemical weapons, they would have used VX in aerosols with greater efficiency and lethality. And why not use the same VX-filled aerosols in other key urban battle-fronts like Aleppo or Homs to expedite victory? Why use “kitchen sarin” and wide-area-effect munitions that will only hinder military advance into contaminated areas?
Hence, what is the basis for the Obama Administration’s confidence that “Assad did it” to the point of threatening military action which in all likelihood would evolve into US involvement in Syria’s bloody civil war? The most honest answer was provided on September 8, 2013, by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on CNN’s State of the Union program. McDonough asserted it was “common sense” that the Syrian Government carried out the chemical attack, and provided no further evidence to back his statement. Nobody pressed McDonough on this point.
The US has long taken sides in the Syrian civil war and all the regional wars and strife integrated into it.
The US placed itself as the self-anointed manager and arbiter of the outcome of this fateful dynamic. Nobody in the region believes the Obama White House’s assurances about a limited strike with no intent of “regime change”. After all this was the exact assurances given by the Obama Administration on the eve of the UNSC’s vote on Libya solely in order to convince Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to abstain and let the resolution pass (which they did). Now, should the US strike Syria, alone or at the head of a makeshift coalition, the US would have crossed the threshold of active participation and leadership. Pressure would mount on the US to complete the job: to invade and get involved directly in the fighting, to secure the strategic weapon arsenals (which will take 75,000-100,000 troops by the Pentagon’s latest estimates), and to overthrow Assad and empower what Bandar calls “moderate” Islamists.
Arab leaders and their Islamist protégés are now convinced that only the US can, and should, defeat the Assad Administration and empower the Islamists for them. Should the US shirk or dither, there would be more and worse provocations, and more innocent Syrians would die in the hands of their brethren and saviors until the US delivered Damascus to the Islamists-jihadists and their sponsors.
After the catastrophe that Libya is today, does Washington really want to try again in Syria?
Wouldn’t confronting reality and the Islamists-jihadists be a more expedient (and honest) way of doing things?
Yossef Bodansky, Senior Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs
http://rt.com/news/turkey-syria-chemical-weapons-850/
Turkish prosecutors indict Syrian rebels for seeking chemical weapons
A court indictment by the Turkish prosecutors into the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian rebels has once again highlighted fears this week that sarin toxic gas was used by the opposition and not the Assad government.
The prosecutor in the Turkish city of Adana has issued a 132-page indictment, alleging that six men of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham tried to seek out chemicals with the intent to produce the nerve agent, sarin gas, a number of Turkish publications reported.
The main suspect in the case, 35-year-old Syrian-national Hytham Qassap has been charged with “being a member of a terrorist organization” and “attempting to acquire weapons for a terrorist organization.” The other 5, all Turkish nationals are being charged with “attempting to acquire weapons for a terrorist organization.”
The indictment alleges that Qassap tried to setup a network in Turkey in order to obtain chemical materials for the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. Citing telephone calls made by the cell, the prosecution believes that the group ordered at least ten tons of chemicals, Al-Alam News Network reports.
The prosecution also dismissed claims that the suspects were unaware of their wrong doing. “The claim that the suspects didn’t know about the possibility of producing sarin nerve gas from the chemicals they tried to buy is not true which was established when they were testifying,” the document reads.
Meanwhile all six suspects have pleaded not guilty. “The suspects have pleaded not guilty saying that they had not been aware the materials they had tried to obtain could have been used to make sarin gas. Suspects have been consistently providing conflicting and incoherent facts on this matter,” the indictment said.
The main suspect in the case, 35-year-old Syrian-national Hytham Qassap has been charged with “being a member of a terrorist organization” and “attempting to acquire weapons for a terrorist organization.” The other 5, all Turkish nationals are being charged with “attempting to acquire weapons for a terrorist organization.”
The indictment alleges that Qassap tried to setup a network in Turkey in order to obtain chemical materials for the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. Citing telephone calls made by the cell, the prosecution believes that the group ordered at least ten tons of chemicals, Al-Alam News Network reports.
The prosecution also dismissed claims that the suspects were unaware of their wrong doing. “The claim that the suspects didn’t know about the possibility of producing sarin nerve gas from the chemicals they tried to buy is not true which was established when they were testifying,” the document reads.
Meanwhile all six suspects have pleaded not guilty. “The suspects have pleaded not guilty saying that they had not been aware the materials they had tried to obtain could have been used to make sarin gas. Suspects have been consistently providing conflicting and incoherent facts on this matter,” the indictment said.
If convicted, Qassab faces a 25 year prison sentence, while his accomplices face 15 years prison terms.
The six men were a part of a group of 11 people arrested in their safe house in Adana on May 23, 2013. Their apprehension came about after surveillance by Turkish police who’d received a tip that Syrian jihadists were trying to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances. Five of the detained were released from custody after questioning, background checks and after lab tests proved that chemicals seized during the arrest were not sarin gas.
The six men were a part of a group of 11 people arrested in their safe house in Adana on May 23, 2013. Their apprehension came about after surveillance by Turkish police who’d received a tip that Syrian jihadists were trying to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances. Five of the detained were released from custody after questioning, background checks and after lab tests proved that chemicals seized during the arrest were not sarin gas.
The international community has long been ignoring worrying reports that the rebel fighters in Syria might be capable of carrying out a chemical attack. Russian President, Vladimir Putin also reiterated this week that while no one doubts that poison gas was indeed used in Syria, there is “every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons.”
Evidence that chemical weapons were used by the opposition was also highlighted by the two European hostages that were freed from Syrian rebel captivity last Sunday. In a phone conversation overheard by hostage Pierre Piccinin da Prata, he said it was clear the rebels used gas on civilians in an August 21 attack near Damascus.
“I don’t think that Bashar Al-Assad and the Syrian government are to blame for the chemical attack in Al-Ghouta,” Piccinin told RT. “It would have been absurd for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons.”
The Syrian government has always rejected any accusations of using chemical weapons. After one of the first alleged incidents in Aleppo in March, it was the government that called on UN to send in chemical experts. Another alleged chemical weapons use was reported in Homs in December 2012.
Russian experts flew out to the site of the attack in March to collect samples from the incident. On 9 July 2013, Moscow submitted the results of its inquiry into the use of chemical weapons at Aleppo to the United Nations. Russian scientists analyzing the 19 March 2013 attack found that it was most likelylaunched by opposition forces, and not the Syrian government.
“It was determined that on March 19 the rebels fired an unguided missile Bashair-3 at the town of Khan al-Assal, which has been under government control. The results of the analysis clearly show that the shell used in Khan al-Assal was not factory made and that it contained sarin,” UN envoy Vitaly Churkin has said.
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria into the attack in March concluded that no evidence of the use of sarin by Syria’s government troops has so far been uncovered. The lead investigator, Carla Del Ponte, did hint that it was the rebels that most likely used the chemical weapons.
Evidence that chemical weapons were used by the opposition was also highlighted by the two European hostages that were freed from Syrian rebel captivity last Sunday. In a phone conversation overheard by hostage Pierre Piccinin da Prata, he said it was clear the rebels used gas on civilians in an August 21 attack near Damascus.
“I don’t think that Bashar Al-Assad and the Syrian government are to blame for the chemical attack in Al-Ghouta,” Piccinin told RT. “It would have been absurd for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons.”
The Syrian government has always rejected any accusations of using chemical weapons. After one of the first alleged incidents in Aleppo in March, it was the government that called on UN to send in chemical experts. Another alleged chemical weapons use was reported in Homs in December 2012.
Russian experts flew out to the site of the attack in March to collect samples from the incident. On 9 July 2013, Moscow submitted the results of its inquiry into the use of chemical weapons at Aleppo to the United Nations. Russian scientists analyzing the 19 March 2013 attack found that it was most likelylaunched by opposition forces, and not the Syrian government.
“It was determined that on March 19 the rebels fired an unguided missile Bashair-3 at the town of Khan al-Assal, which has been under government control. The results of the analysis clearly show that the shell used in Khan al-Assal was not factory made and that it contained sarin,” UN envoy Vitaly Churkin has said.
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria into the attack in March concluded that no evidence of the use of sarin by Syria’s government troops has so far been uncovered. The lead investigator, Carla Del Ponte, did hint that it was the rebels that most likely used the chemical weapons.
“The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic wishes to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict. As a result, the Commission is not in a position to further comment on the allegations at this time,” the statement read.
Meanwhile, the UN chemical weapons inspection team has completed the report on the latest chemical attack in Syria on August 21 and will deliver it to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon over the weekend.
"I believe that the report will be an overwhelming report that chemical weapons (were) used, even though I cannot publicly say at this time before I receive this report," Moon said.
Although the team was not authorized to draw any conclusions on who was the perpetrator of the attack, a number of US officials speaking to the media on condition of anonymity over the last couple of days indicated that the report would hint the Assad government was responsible.
"I believe that the report will be an overwhelming report that chemical weapons (were) used, even though I cannot publicly say at this time before I receive this report," Moon said.
Although the team was not authorized to draw any conclusions on who was the perpetrator of the attack, a number of US officials speaking to the media on condition of anonymity over the last couple of days indicated that the report would hint the Assad government was responsible.
http://rt.com/news/syria-resolution-france-un-843/
France submits Syria UN resolution with ‘further measures’ on the table
The international community would enforce “further measures” under Chapter VII of the Security Council, in case Syria fails to pass a “continuous review” of the chemical disarmament process, the draft UN resolution submitted by France suggests.
The French resolution demands that the Syrian government provides “unfettered access to its chemical weapons sites” and allows “international inspectors to make surprise visits to locations of their choice,”according to al-Arabiya.
The UN supervisors deployed in Syria would “oversee the dismantlement and destruction of all elements”of the chemical weapons program to prevent the possibility of its production or usage in the future.
According to the draft, Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles are supposed to be placed under international control immediately after the UN resolution is adopted to ensure that there is no more production, use or transfer of chemical weapons. The draft also sets a 90-day deadline for all political parties in Syria to sit down and form a transitional government.
After the consultations between the United States, France and Britain the strong wording of France’s initial draft resolution was reportedly weakened to call for imposing “further measures” only if the international inspectors considered the Syrian government was does complying with its obligations.
Meanwhile, US officials indicated that the UN Security Council resolution on Syria's chemical weapons was unlikely to include any provisions threatening possible use of military force.
The United States would instead insist that the resolution include a range of consequences, such as stricter sanctions, the officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
However, US officials have not backed down from pushing a non-military sanctions provision under Chapter VII.
Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter allows the UN Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and to take both military and non-military action to "restore international peace and security."
Russia and China holding veto power in the Security Council have already used it three times to block Western resolutions with potential backdoors for direct military intervention in the Syrian conflict.
Meanwhile, during the second day of talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the parties have agreed the only solution to the ongoing Syrian crisis lies within the framework of the “Geneva-2” peace talks. Russian President Vladimir Putin also recently said the proposal could only succeed if the US and its allies calls off military strikes.
The meeting between Russian and US teams is reaching its "pivotal point" and will continue on Saturday, RIA Novosti cited a source in the Russian delegation as saying.
and.......
The concession means that the Russian resolution will essentially be the one accepted, and that while still officially claiming the “right” to attack Syria at any time, the Obama Administration is backing off its threats.
By | Associated Press – 14 hrs ago
and.......
US Retreats, UN Syria Resolution Won’t Include Military Option
Attempt to Sneak War Language Into Chemical Deal Fails
by Jason Ditz, September 13, 2013
A French attempt to sneak language authorizing military action into the UN Security Council resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons disarmament, a plan backed by US and British officials, has failed, and the US is resigned to the resolution moving forward without any military option built in.
The concession means that the Russian resolution will essentially be the one accepted, and that while still officially claiming the “right” to attack Syria at any time, the Obama Administration is backing off its threats.
US officials had previously criticized the Russian plan as “toothless” because it didn’t include a threat of war, but since Syria has already ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) now, there was realistically little argument to be made for threatening war in the resolution.
US and Russian officials are holding talks in Geneva on the matter at the moment, and the tack the administration is now taking is to try to include some sort of vague threat of sanctions if the CWC disarmament, which is expected to take many years at any rate, begins stalling.
Russian officials have been adamant about not including anything that could even tangentially refer to military action in the UN resolutions on Syria, noting that a Libya resolution authorizing a no-fly zone was immediately spun by the US as authorization for an all-out war of regime change, and fearing that Syria would be a repeat.
The US, more than any other nation, exemplifies the slow nature of the process of disarmament, as the Nixon Administration began a process of unilateral disarmament by dumping weapons wholesale in the ocean, and 45 years later the US still retains such weapons, and isn’t expected to be done disposing of them for another decade.
In Syria, the process has the extra complication of an ongoing civil war, meaning that job one for the international community will be keeping al-Qaeda dominated rebel factions from seizing the arms.
and...
In US arsenal, lessons for Syria chemical weapons
By | Associated Press – 14 hrs ago- Associated Press/Ed Andrieski, File - FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2010 file photo Debra Michaels, Chemical Operations Manager uses a flashlight to inspect mustard agent shells in one of the bunkers at the Pueblo
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- FILE - This Jan. 21, 2010 file …
WASHINGTON (AP) — It's not easy or quick to get rid of a nation'schemical weapons. Just ask the United States.
Three decades after the U.S. started destroying its own chemical weapons, the nation's stockpile stands at more than 3,000 tons — about three times what the U.S. now says Syrian President Bashar Assad controls.
While the U.S. has made significant progress eradicating 90 percent of the 31,500 tons it once possessed, the military doesn't expect to complete destruction until 2023.
Experts say it's probably simpler to make chemical weapons than to get rid of them.
"Disposal requires such rigorous processes to ensure there is no pollution or residual agent," said Susannah Sirkin, international policy director for Physicians for Human Rights, which has been monitoring weapons of mass destruction for more than two decades. "On average it is costing about 10 times more to destroy than it did to make the munitions."
The two basic destruction methods — chemical neutralization and incineration — both require specialized facilities. Using incineration, chemicals must be heated to thousands of degrees. Decades-old storage containers can be leaky and tough to handle. And destruction produces highly hazardous waste that must be carefully stored.
Assembled weapons, where chemicals already have been loaded into rockets and packed with explosives, pose their own dangers. They also can leak, or go off by accident, contaminating the environment.
Sirkin said negotiators of the Chemical Weapons Convention that banned such weaponry probably thought the initial 10-year deadline for the U.S. to dispose of everything sounded reasonable. Engineers would have told them differently; especially when it takes time to build the facilities and to overcome not-in-my-backyard objections from people who live near the plants.
Now, as the U.S. and others push Syria to surrender its arsenal, the steep challenges that have hindered America's efforts for a generation illustrate the daunting task of securing and ultimately dismantling Assad's stockpiles in the middle of a civil war.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were meeting over two days with chemical weapons experts in Geneva to discuss how to do exactly that. They hoped to emerge with the outlines of a plan.
The remaining U.S. stockpile includes many of the same chemicals in Assad's possession. The Syrian regime has more than 1,000 tons of sulfur, mustard gas and the ingredients for sarin and the nerve agent VX, Kerry told Congress this week.
Under a tenuous diplomatic deal being coordinated by Russia, which holds the world's largest remaining chemical weapons stockpile, Syria would join the Chemical Weapons Convention, declare its stockpiles and hand them over to the international community for destruction, all to avert a punitive U.S. military strike.
It's unclear how that colossal task could be carried out when there's distrust of Syria in the international community, uncertainty about the weapons' locations and ongoing fighting between Assad's forces and rebels. The White House says it will require extensive verification to ensure that stall tactics aren't disguised as legitimate holdups.
In the U.S., those holdups have ranged from environmental delays and political opposition to technical and safety challenges to tough laws restricting the transport of chemical weapons. Likewise, it's been difficult to round up the tens of billions of dollars to pay for destroying the cache.
"All of this is a slow process," said Dieter Rothbacher, a former U.N. chemical weapons inspector who has worked in Iraq, Russia and the U.S. "Falling behind (schedule) is actually relatively easy."
The U.S. started developing chemical weapons around World War I, steadily increasing its capabilities through World War II until 1968. The stockpile grew to about 31,500 tons of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents, according to the Army. Russia, by comparison, has said it amassed about 44,000 tons.
The move toward destroying the United States' chemical weapons started in the 1970s, building momentum in the 1980s when Congress directed the Defense Department to start eliminating the stockpile.
That commitment became an international obligation when the U.S. signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993 and ratified it four years later. That started the clock on a 10-year period in which the U.S. was supposed to destroy the rest of its chemical weapons.
The Army used to destroy chemical weapons at nine sites across the country. By January 2012, troops had completed 90 percent of the job, and only two active sites now remain.
In an arid stretch of desert about 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, Colo., sits the Pueblo Chemical Depot. The Army says that's where about 2,600 tons of mustard gas is situated in projectiles and mortar cartridges. The destruction facility is finished but still being tested, with plans to start operations in 2015. The depot employs more than 900 people and is expected to end its work by 2019.
The other site, just outside Richmond, Ky., isn't as far along. The destruction plant at the Blue Grass Army Depot is only about 70 percent complete as of this summer, and the Army doesn't expect to open it until 2020. Work at Blue Grass to destroy 523 tons of nerve and blister agents stored in rockets and projectiles should wrap up by 2023, if everything goes as planned.
The U.S. has long since missed its original 2007 deadline, which was extended to 2012, then missed again. Russia is behind schedule too.
Such are the odds as the U.S. and its allies turn to Syria and demand swift, complete and verifiable action to ensure never again can Assad use poison gas.
UN Human Rights Committee item....
http://rt.com/news/un-hospitals-attack-syria-834/
‘War crimes against healthcare’: Syrian govt, rebels deliberately target hospitals – UN report
Syrian hospitals as well as medical personnel are being deliberately targeted both by the government forces and the rebels during the ongoing violence in the country, UN investigators say. Under international law, such acts are considered war crimes.
“The deliberate targeting of hospitals, medical personnel and transports, the denial of access to medical care, and ill-treatment of the sick and wounded, has been one of the most alarming features of the Syrian conflict,” the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic said in a report on its findings published on Friday.
The report is based on the investigation by a team of human rights experts that was set up in August 2011 and is headed by Brazilian Paulo Pinheiro.
The group was not granted access to Syria: it based its inquiry on interviews with over 2,400 victims and witnesses. Investigators talked to Syrian refugees and defectors in neighboring countries and conducted telephone or Skype interviews with those in Syria. Experts also reviewed photos, satellite images, videos, forensic and medical records, as well as reports from governments and non-governmental sources.
The investigative team described a number of cases when forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad assaulted medical care facilities during the conflict.
Rebel groups have also been involved in atrocities such as attacking hospitals, but – according to examples provided in the document – on a smaller scale. In the cases presented in the report, the rebel forces were described as only trying to push the government troops out of the medical facilities that were“occupied” and turned into “military bases.”
“Victims relay harrowing accounts of the wounded and sick languishing at checkpoints unable to reach medical treatment, coming under renewed attack in hospital and doctors providing impartial aid being arrested and targeted,” the document reads.
When violence in Syria escalated in early 2012, pro-government troops “bombed and shelled opposition-operated field hospitals providing treatment to the wounded,” the reports says.
According to the UN experts, “the pattern of attacks” indicates that they “deliberately targeted hospitals and medical units to gain military advantage by depriving anti-government armed groups and their perceived supporters of medical assistance.” These attacks, the document says, continue to date.
Hospitals in Homs, Bab Amr, Al Qusayr, Tal Rifat and other placed have repeatedly been targeted by the government forces, the authors claim.
“Intentionally directing attacks against hospitals and places containing the sick and the wounded and against medical units using the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem is a war crime in non-international armed conflict.”
Speaking about recent attacks by rebel groups, the document mentioned an incident in late May when armed groups attacked the National Hospital in Dara’a and caused it considerable damage.
A member of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade that carried out the attack said that “his group believed that there were approximately 50 patients in the hospital, and that all were affiliated with the Government,”UN investigators cited. “When orders were given to attack the hospital, none of the fighters involved protested that it was a protected object and no warnings were given prior to the attack.”
According to the experts, there are “increasing indications that certain anti-Government armed groups also fail to respect medical personnel.”
The UN group of investigators concluded that the actions “of the Syrian Government from 2011 to date have been a cynical betrayal” of the principle that stands for the protection of the sick and wounded and those who help them.
They also said that anti-Government armed group attacks against hospitals “are of grave concern, as they demonstrate a disregard for the specially protected status of healthcare facilities and a failure to take precautions to avoid civilian casualties and protected the sick and wounded.”
The allegations made in the report will be discussed on Monday in Geneva at a debate at the UN Human Rights Council, Reuters reports. So far, neither the Syrian government nor the opposition representatives have commented on the matter.
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