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U.N. Report Confirms Rockets Loaded With Sarin in Aug. 21 Attack U.N. Implicates Syria in Using Chemical Arms
(about 5 hours later)
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 Monday in the first official confirmation by nonpartisan scientific experts, saying such munitions had been deployed “on a relatively large scale” in the Syria conflict. A United Nations report released on Monday confirmed that a deadly chemical arms attack caused a mass killing in Syria last month and for the first time provided extensive forensic details of the weapons used, which strongly implicated the Syrian government.
Although the widely awaited report did not ascribe blame for the attack, it provided in graphic and clinical detail the evidence of sarin residue in three neighborhoods in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, the precise types of projectiles and trajectories to deliver it and the symptoms of the victims. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack the most horrific use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein of Iraq gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja a quarter century ago. While the report’s authors did not assign blame for the attack on the outskirts of Damascus, the details it documented included the large size and particular shape of the munitions and the precise direction from which two of them had been fired. Taken together, that information appeared to undercut arguments by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that rebel forces, who are not known to possess such weapons or the training or ability to use them, had been responsible.
“The report makes for chilling reading,” Mr. Ban told a news conference after he delivered the report to the Security Council. “The findings are beyond doubt and beyond the pale. This is a war crime.” The report, commissioned by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was the first independent on-the-ground scientific inquest into the attack, which left hundreds of civilians gassed to death, including children, early on Aug. 21.
Mr. Ban declined to say which side he blamed. The repercussions have elevated the 30-month-old Syrian conflict into a global political crisis that is testing the limits of impunity over the use of chemical weapons. It could also lead to the first concerted action on the war at the United Nations Security Council, which up to now has been paralyzed over Syria policy.
The United States and its allies quickly seized on the volume of evidence in the 38-page report to draw the conclusion that only Syrian government forces of President Bashar al-Assad had the capability to carry out such a strike, calling it validation of their own long-held assertions. But Russia’s ambassador said there too many unanswered questions to draw such a conclusion. “The report makes for chilling reading,” Mr. Ban told a news conference after he briefed the Security Council. “The findings are beyond doubt and beyond the pale. This is a war crime.”
The report’s release punctuated a tumultuous week spawned by the global outrage over the Aug. 21 attack, in which an American threat of punitive force on the Syrian government was delayed as Russia proposed a diplomatic alternative, Syria agreed to ban chemical weapons and intense diplomacy between the United States and Russia led to a sweeping agreement in which Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal could be destroyed by the middle of 2014. Mr. Ban declined to ascribe blame, saying that responsibility was up to others, but he expressed hope that the attack would become a catalyst for a new diplomatic determination at the United Nations to resolve the Syrian conflict, which has left more than 100,000 people dead and millions displaced.
The United Nations itself, in danger of becoming irrelevant in helping end the 30-month-old Syria conflict, was suddenly thrust back into a central role, with the long-paralyzed Security Council engaged in deliberations over an enforceable measure to hold Syria to its commitment on chemical weapons, even as the war in that country shows no sign of abating. There was no immediate reaction to the report from the Syrian government. But just two days before the report was released, Syria officially agreed to join the international convention on banning chemical weapons, and the United States and Russia, which have repeatedly clashed over Syria, agreed on a plan to identify and purge those weapons from the country by the middle of next year. Syria has said it would abide by that plan.
The report concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.” The main point of the report was to establish whether chemical weapons had been used in the Aug. 21 attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, an area long infiltrated by rebels. The United Nations inspectors concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.”
The inspectors, who visited the Damascus suburbs that suffered the attack and left the country with large amounts of evidence on Aug. 31, said that “In particular, 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.” The weapons inspectors, who visited Ghouta and left the country with large amounts of evidence on Aug. 31, said, “In particular, 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.”
Mr. Ban told reporters “it is for others to decide whether to pursue this matter further to determine a response” and that the chemical weapons inspectors intended to return to Syria to investigate other suspected chemical weapons attacks, including some in which Mr. Assad’s side claims insurgents had used them. But the report’s annexes, detailing what the authors found, were what caught the attention of nonproliferation experts.
Speaking to reporters later, the American ambassador, Samantha Power, and British ambassador, Sir Mark Lyall-Grant, were emphatic in their assertions that the report implicated Mr. Assad, whose government has amassed one of the largest stockpiles of chemical munitions over the past two decades, and only last week admitted it possessed them. In one particularly incriminating piece of information, the inspectors said the remnants of a warhead found in the attack’s aftermath showed its capacity of sarin to be about 56 liters — far larger than the suspected delivery systems used in alleged chemical weapons attacks before the Aug. 21 strike.
“This was no cottage-industry use of chemical weapons,” said Sir Mark said. The evidence “confirms, in our view, that there was no remaining doubt that it was the regime” that used the chemical weapons. The investigators were unable to examine all of the munitions used, but were able to find and measure several rockets or their components. Using standard field techniques for ordnance identification and crater analysis, they established that at least two types of rockets had been used, including an M14 artillery rocket bearing Cyrillic markings and a 330-millimeter rocket of unidentified provenance.
Ambassador Power concurred, saying: “The technical details of the U.N. report make clear that only the regime could have carried out this large scale of chemical weapons attack.” These findings, though not presented as evidence of responsibility, were likely to strengthen the argument of those who claim the Syrian government bears the blame, because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency.
The report carried the conclusions of a team of inspectors headed by Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish chemical weapons expert, under the auspices of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a Hague-based institution that monitors compliance with a 1997 treaty outlawing such munitions. Moreover, those weapons are fired by large, conspicuous launchers. For rebels to have carried out the attack, they would have had to organize an operation with weapons they are not known to have and of considerable scale, sophistication and secrecy — moving the launchers undetected into position in areas under strong government influence or control, keeping them in place unmolested for a sustained attack that would have generated extensive light and noise, and then successfully withdrawing them — all without being detected in any way.
The report said the facts supporting its conclusion included “impacted and exploded surface-to-surface rockets, capable to carry a chemical payload,” which “were found to contain sarin.” The facts also included sarin-contaminated areas at the sites, more than 50 interviews given by survivors and health care workers, clear signs of exposure in patients and survivors, and blood and urine samples by those patients and survivors that were “found positive for sarin and sarin signatures.” One annex to the report also identified azimuths, or angular measurements, from where rockets had struck, back to their points of origin. When plotted and marked independently on maps by analysts from Human Rights Watch and by The New York Times, the United Nations data from two widely scattered impact sites pointed directly to a Syrian military complex.
The consistency of the symptoms included “shortness of breath, eye irritation, excessive salivation, convulsions, confusion/disorientation and miosis,” or constriction of the pupils. First responders also became ill, the report said, “with one describing the onset of blurred vision, generalized weakness, shaking, a sensation of impending doom, followed by fainting.” Other nonproliferation experts said the United Nations report was damning in its implicit incrimination of Mr. Assad’s side in the conflict, not only in the weaponry fragments but the azimuth data that indicated the attack’s origins. An analysis of the report posted online by the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said “the additional details and the perceived objectivity of the inspectors buttress the assignment of blame to Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government.”
The report also found that the weather conditions on the morning of Aug. 21 may have increased the number of victims because the temperatures had been falling. The use of chemical munitions in such conditions, the report said, “maximizes their potential impact as the heavy gas can stay close to the ground and penetrate into lower levels of buildings and constructions where many people were seeking shelter.” The United States and its allies seized on the volume of data in the report to reaffirm their conclusion that only Syrian government forces had the ability to carry out such a strike, calling it a validation of their own long-held assertions.
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. Both the British and American ambassadors to the United Nations also told reporters that the report’s lead author, Dr. Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish scientist who joined Mr. Ban in the Security Council briefing, had told members that quality of the sarin used in the attack was high.
The report did not specify the number of people killed in the attack. The United States has asserted that more than 1,400 people were killed, including more than 400 children. That would be the worst single death toll in the conflict, in which more than 100,000 people have been killed. “This was no cottage-industry use of chemical weapons,” said the British ambassador, Sir Mark Lyall-Grant. “The type of munitions, the trajectories, which confirmed the analysis that British experts have done about the provenance of where the rockets were fired from, all of that confirms, in our view, that there is no remaining doubt that it was the regime that used chemical weapons.”
Mr. Assad and Russia, his principal foreign ally, have said Syrian insurgents were responsible. Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, acknowledged implicitly the credibility issue that has confronted the United States on Syria chemical weapons use, a legacy of the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led the United States into the Iraq war a decade ago.
The release of the report came as a separate panel of investigators from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva said they were investigating 14 episodes of suspected chemical weapons use in the conflict and would use the report to help identify those responsible for the Aug. 21 attack. “We understand some countries did not accept on faith that the samples of blood and hair that the United States received from people affected by the Aug. 21 attack contained sarin,” she said. “But now Dr. Sellstrom’s samples show the same thing. And it’s very important to note that the regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition posses sarin.”
Panel members and diplomats acknowledge, however, that gaining entry to Syria is essential to complete the investigation. Syria this month invited one of the four panelists, Carla del Ponte, to visit “in her personal capacity,” said Paulo Pinheiro, the panel’s chairman. But he said, but any visit could only take place as a member of the panel. The entire panel, he said, had asked for permission to visit. Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, said there were still too many unanswered questions. In talking to reporters, he asked, if the Syrian forces had indeed been responsible and sought to attack insurgents, “how is it possible to fire projectiles at your opponent and miss them all?”
Mr. Pinheiro’s panel, which relies on testimony and interviews with Syrian refugees and defectors, has been accused by President Assad of an inherent antigovernment bias in its quarterly reporting of rights abuses in the conflict. Mr. Pinheiro has argued that the government should allow it to enter Syria for that very reason. “We need not jump to any conclusions,” he said.
The panel has said that abuses have been committed by both sides but that the government is responsible for most of them. The report’s release punctuated a tumultuous week spawned by the global outrage over the attack, in which an American threat of punitive force on the Syrian government was delayed as Russia proposed a diplomatic alternative and intense negotiations between the United States and Russia led to a sweeping agreement under which Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal could be destroyed.
” The United Nations, in danger of becoming irrelevant in helping to end the Syria conflict, was suddenly thrust back into a central role, with the Security Council now engaged in deliberations over an enforceable measure to hold Syria to its commitment on chemical weapons.

Rick Gladstone reported from New York, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of France and Britain said Monday that they would not tolerate delays in dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons.
“It is extremely important that there are no evasions,” William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said at a news conference with Mr. Kerry in Paris.
Mr. Kerry said, “If Assad fails in time to abide by the terms of this framework, make no mistake, we are all agreed — and that includes Russia — that there will be consequences.”
The release of the report came as a separate panel of investigators from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva said they were investigating 14 episodes of suspected chemical weapons use.

Reporting was contributed by Michael R. Gordon from Paris, Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva, Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon, and David E. Sanger from New York.