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Syria Official Insists Chemical Attack Wasn’t Carried Out by Government
Syrians Were Poisoned by Banned Nerve Agent Sarin, Turkey Says
(about 1 hour later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s foreign minister challenged again on Thursday accounts by witnesses, experts and world leaders that his government carried out a chemical attack that killed scores of people in the country’s north this week.
ISTANBUL — The poison used in the deadly chemical bomb attack in a rebel-held part of northern Syria this week was the banned nerve agent sarin, the Turkish Health Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
“I stress to you once again: The Syrian Army has not, did not and will not use this kind of weapons — not just against our own people, but even against the terrorists that attack our civilians with their mortar rounds,” the minister, Walid al-Moallem, said at a news conference in Damascus.
The statement from Turkey, where many of the stricken Syrians were taken after the assault on Tuesday, was the most specific about the cause.
Mr. Moallem repeated an explanation, which experts say is implausible, that the toxic substances were dispersed after the Syrian Army conducted an air raid on an insurgent weapons depot at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday. His statement echoed a Russian account of what had happened that witnesses and Western leaders say is contradicted by the evidence.
“According to the results of preliminary tests,” the statement said, “patients were exposed to chemical material (Sarin).”
The attack, on Tuesday morning in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province, was the worst in Syria since August 2013, when a similar attack led President Barack Obama to consider a more direct military intervention in the conflict — a plan he abandoned when Syria promised to destroy all of its stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Western countries have accused the Syrian government of the chemical attack, one of the worst so far in the six-year-old Syria war. Syria has repeatedly denied responsibility.
The United States, Britain and France blame the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for the attack and put forward a resolution at the United Nations Security Council condemning it and calling for an international investigation. Russia has deemed the resolution unacceptable.
On Thursday, Mr. Moallem placed blame for the toxic cloud that killed more than 100 people on insurgents fighting Mr. Assad’s government.
“It attacked an arms depot belonging to the Al Nusra Front that contained chemical weapons,” he said of the government airstrike. The Nusra Front, now known as the Levant Victory Front, was once Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and is the main jihadist rival in Syria of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
“Al Nusra Front and ISIS and other organizations continue to store chemical weapons in urban and residential areas,” he added.
Asked whether Syria would present proof that it was not involved in the attack, Mr. Moallem responded, “How am I supposed to go to Khan Sheikhoun if it’s held by Al Nusra?”
Independent evidence, however, continued to suggest that the Syrian military was to blame.
Dr. Monzer Khalil, the health director of Idlib Province, said medical teams had collected samples of blood, urine, hair and clothing from the victims and of soil and other materials in the areas where the poison spread. The samples were being preserved and offered to international agencies and governments as evidence, he said in an interview via Skype.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has in the past refused to accept samples not collected by its own teams and has accepted others but given them less weight as evidence, according to Syrians who have worked for years to collect samples from what were suspected to be attacks.
Turkish news outlets quoted Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag of Turkey as saying that autopsies conducted on three Syrians brought to his country after the attack showed they had been subjected to a chemical agent.
“It was determined after the autopsy that a chemical weapon was used,” the private DHA news agency reported him as saying.
Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Tugrul Turkes, told the state-run Anadolu Agency on Thursday that the Russian explanation was “unfulfilling.” “If the Syrian regime knew that there were chemical weapons in the warehouse, it should have also known that it should not have attacked it,” he said.
He added that he believed the attack “was the work of the regime and that it was an attack against civilians.”
In Russia, which along with Iran has been Mr. Assad’s major patron, officials said the case against Mr. Assad was far from clear.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, warned the West on Thursday against rushing to blame Mr. Assad.
He said that the West lacked objective evidence, and that materials presented by the White Helmets, a Syrian humanitarian group, did not suffice as proof.
“The use of chemical weapons is absolutely inadmissible,” Mr. Peskov said, adding that the Syrian Army must act to “prevent any chemical agents that can be used as weapons from falling into the terrorists’ hands.”
Later on Thursday, however, Mr. Peskov said that the Russian government supported a full investigation into the attack and that the Kremlin’s support for Mr. Assad’s government was “not unconditional.”
The Russian-Syrian posture came under immediate attack from Western leaders, including President Trump, who had urged his predecessor, Mr. Obama, in 2013 not to intervene in Syria. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that the chemical attack had “crossed a lot of lines for me,” and added, “My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.” He did not specify his plans.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said he “cannot understand how anybody on the U.N. Security Council could fail to sign up to a motion condemning the actions of the regime that is almost certainly responsible for that crime.”
Mr. Johnson called the attack “abominable and contemptible” and vowed to force a vote on the resolution. Russia could easily use its veto power as a permanent member of the Council to block an investigation, but whether it is prepared to do so, on the world stage, is not yet clear.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, took a more moderate stance, telling CNews television that “France is still seeking to talk with its partners on the Security Council,” including “Russia in particular.”
“These crimes must not remain unpunished,” he said, adding, “One day, international justice will rule on Assad.”
