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Syria Rights Panel Investigating 14 Attacks for Use of Chemical Weapons
U.N. Report Confirms Rockets Loaded With Sarin in Aug. 21 Attack
(35 minutes later)
GENEVA — As international preparations to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal gathered momentum, United Nations investigators monitoring human rights abuses in Syria said on Monday that they were investigating 14 episodes that apparently involved chemical weapons use to identify who was responsible.
Rockets armed with the banned chemical nerve agent sarin were used in a mass killing near Damascus on Aug. 21, United Nations chemical weapons inspectors reported on Monday in the first official confirmation by scientific experts that such munitions had been deployed in the Syria conflict.
Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of a four-member panel, told reporters in Geneva that the investigation would be assisted by a report by weapons inspectors that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was presenting to the Security Council.
Although the widely awaited report did not ascribe blame for the attack, it concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.”
The weapons inspectors’ report, to be formally released later Monday, was widely expected to confirm the use of chemical weapons in an Aug. 21 attack in which the United States said more than 1,400 people died, but not to ascribe responsibility for that attack. Mr. Pinheiro told reporters that ascribing responsibility was his commission’s job.
The inspectors, who visited the Damascus suburbs that suffered the attack and left the country with large amounts of evidence 10 days after the episode, said that “the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin” were used.
Panel members and diplomats acknowledge, however, that gaining entry to Syria is essential to complete the investigation. Syria this month invited one member of the panel, Carla del Ponte, to visit “in her personal capacity,” Mr. Pinheiro said, but any visit could take place only as a member of the commission. The panel, he said, had asked that he also be allowed to visit.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who ordered the report, received it on Sunday and presented it to the 15-member Security Council on Monday in a closed-door session.
Mr. Pinheiro’s commission, which relies on testimony and interviews with Syrian refugees and defectors, has been accused by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of an inherent antigovernment bias in its quarterly reporting of rights abuses in the 30-month conflict. Mr. Pinheiro has argued that the government should allow it to enter Syria for that very reason.
Although the report confirmed what the United States, its allies and Human Rights Watch had already concluded about the nature of the attack, it was nonetheless regarded as important as the first purely scientific and politically neutral accounting of the facts about the weapons that were used.
The panel has said that abuses have been committed by both sides in the conflict but that the government is responsible for most of them.
The United States and its allies have accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of responsibility for the attack. Mr. Assad and Russia, his principal foreign ally, have said Syrian insurgents were responsible.
Mr. Pinheiro had earlier told the United Nations Human Rights Council that conventional weapons were responsible for a vast majority of casualties. He reported that the government had continued daily and indiscriminate bombardments of civilians, while extremist antigovernment groups had also targeted civilians in attacks in northern Syria.
Rick
Gladstone reported from New York, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.
Among recent examples of war crimes by the government, he cited an attack in late August in which a government jet dropped an incendiary bomb on a school, killing eight immediately and severely burning 50. The panel's report also condemned what it called the government’s use of cluster bombs and siege tactics against opposition-held areas.
But the panel also reported “an upsurge in crimes and abuses committed by extremist antigovernment armed groups along with an influx of foreign fighters.” It said that “entire brigades are now made up from fighters who crossed into Syria.”
The panel cited executions of captured government soldiers, killings of Kurdish civilians in several locations and mass killings in villages made up of Alawites, the Shiite sect that forms the bedrock of support for Mr. Assad.
In an interview on Monday, Ms. del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor for two international tribunals, also singled out for special mention the violent actions committed by antigovernment extremists. “I saw a methodology of torture, of sexual violence, of killing that was particularly, particularly terrible,” Ms del Ponte said. “I never saw such facts even as prosecutor” for the international tribunal that investigated war crimes in the Balkans, she added.
