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New claims have surfaced that President Bashar Assad’s regime launched chemical attacks with an industrial chemical agent earlier in the month, despite its international agreement to get rid of its entire chemical arsenal. The latest evidence, cited by French and US authorities, comes as Syria announced its plant to hold a presidential election on June 3, which the Syrian opposition and the United Nations have called a “farce”.
On Monday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “we have indications of the use of a toxic industrial chemical, probably chlorine, in Syria this month, in the opposition-dominated village of Kafr Zita. We are examining allegations that the government was responsible”.
The discovery comes after an announcement on Sunday by French President Francois Hollande that his country had “information”, but had no proof, that the Assad regime is still using chemical weapons. There have been contradictory reports of alleged chlorine gas attacks in rebel held Kafr Zita in central Hama earlier this month, with both the opposition and the government blaming each other. Meanwhile, new reports of several other chlorine gas attacks elsewhere in the country have surfaced, most recently in the northwestern Idlib province on Monday.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), along with other experts, have been working for months to remove Syria’s chemical arsenal, following the international agreement after a lethal chemical attack left hundreds dead near Damascus last August. The West had blamed the attacks on the Assad regime, with the US even threatening military action against Syria, before backtracking and agreeing to a deal to eliminate all chemical weapons in Syria.
Last week, the OPCW said that 65% of the chemical weapons in Syria were removed from the country. However, chlorine is widely used for domestic and commercial purposes, and hence Syria didn’t have to submit its chlorine stockpiles to the OPCW, according to experts.
