Watchdog to investigate fresh chemical claims in Syria

A chemical weapons watchdog has said it will look into fresh allegations that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has launched several chlorine attacks against civilians in the past month.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced that it will lead a new mission “to establish facts surrounding allegations of use of chlorine in Syria” in a meeting at The Hague on Tuesday.

The Syrian government has accepted the mission and a team is expected to depart for Syria “soon”, Director-General of the OPCW Ahmed Uzumcu said in a statement on the group’s website.

The announcement comes after British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported a team of experts had found “sizable and unambiguous traces of chlorine and ammonia” in soil samples taken from the sites of three regime helicopter attacks.

“We have unequivocally proved that the regime has used chlorine and ammonia against its own civilians in the last two to three weeks” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British chemical weapons expert involved in the testing, told the Telegraph.

A Syrian doctor trained by chemical weapons experts collected soil samples from attacks that took place on 11, 18 and 21 April in Kafr Zita, a town in the north of the country, in which several people died and hundreds more were seriously injured.

The attacks were conducted by helicopter, according to the Telegraph, meaning the Assad regime must be responsible for the strikes as they are the only ones with access to aerial power in the conflict.

The regime and rebels have blamed each other for using chlorine in at least one of the attacks in Kafr Zita, while the opposition continues to blame the government for numerous chemical weapons strikes in recent weeks.

The OPCW is already in Syria overseeing a deal under which Damascus said 92.5 percent of the country’s chemical weapons material had been removed or destroyed.

The deal did not chlorine as a substance to be handed over but its use in warfare contravenes the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Syria is a state party since signing the treaty last year.

Syria agreed to hand over its chemical weapons stockpile after a sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb last August which killed up to 1,400 people, causing international condemnation and a threat of military strikes from US President Barack Obama.

The government denied carrying out the attack and close ally Russia claimed rebels could have been responsible in an attempt to provoke international intervention.

These latest allegations, however, appear to have presented the most compelling evidence yet that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons against the civilian population.

“For the first time there is independent collected and produced evidence that the regime has been using chlorine and ammonia” said chemical weapons expert de Bretton-Gordon in the Telegraph.