Konflikten i Syrien

God, Syria, Freedom. Whoever kills his own people is a traitor

For a second time the LRB has aired Seymour Hersh’s highly shaky claim that the opposition was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta on 21 August 2013 (LRB, 17 April). Hersh provides only one source for the key claims in his piece: a ‘former intelligence official’. As the bloggers Eliot Higgins and Scott Lucas have shown, he entirely ignores the overwhelming balance of tangible evidence that indicates the responsibility of the regime for the Ghouta attack. The two types of munitions found at the site were the Soviet M14 and an improvised type of rocket known as ‘the Volcano’. Both have been spotted in several combat videos, always being used by regime forces and never by the opposition. Contrary to Hersh’s claims in his first article, all of the rockets used were well within range of regime-held areas (LRB, 19 December 2013). The position of the intact munitions, in particular ‘Missile 197’, indicates a firing point to the north, where the regime-held areas were. The 21 August incident involved multiple rocket attacks on the Ghouta from those directions.

A lot hinges on Hersh’s implication that the Islamist fighters arrested in Turkey in May 2013 were part of a sarin-producing operation. Indeed, the local press did report that the men were carrying two kilogrammes of sarin. The charges laid by the court did not say this: they said that the men were carrying chemicals that could have been used to produce sarin. Perhaps they intended to do so, but they would have needed much more time. At least eight ‘Volcanoes’ were fired on the Ghouta. Each warhead carries an estimated fifty litres of sarin. It took Aum Shinrikyo years, trillions of yen and a dedicated factory to come up with less than a tenth of that. Not only did the jihadists supposedly come up with the sarin in miraculously large quantities without anyone knowing about it, according to Hersh’s intelligence official they then filled perfect copies of regime munitions with the stuff, transported them to areas north of the Ghouta (unopposed by the regime forces occupying those areas) and launched them at their own side.

Hersh has dropped his arguments of December – including the claim that a secret US sensory system in Syria should have shown evidence of the attack – and wants us to take the word of a single unnamed spook instead.

Since the Sarin attacks in Damascus on August 21st 2013 I’ve spent a lot of time examining various aspects of the attack, from the munitions used to various claims and counter-claims about who was responsible for the attack. One point of debate has been the range of the Volcano rockets used to deliver Sarin in the east of Damascus. Work by the Ted Postol and the late Richard Lloyd pointed to a range of “about 2 to 2.5 kilometres“, which led to claims from some quarters that this range would mean that the Volcano rockets could not have been fired from government controlled territory, as it was assumed the front-lines were more than 2.5km away from the impact sites of the rockets.

However, my own work analysing videos and other information posted by both sides in the conflict, including videos from the Russian language news network ANNA News who were embedded with Syrian government forces in the area, established the front-line positions were within 2km of the impact sites. My analysis, Identifying Government Positions During The August 21st Sarin Attacks, established the following area as government controlled after the Syrian military’s Operation al-Qaboun.