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In April of 2018, the US, Britain and France bombed Syria under the pretense that it had used chemical weapons against rebels in Syria. The three countries rushed to bomb Syria, before the OPCW's Fact-Finding Mission could clear up what had actually happened in Douma.
Initially, there was a leaked internal report from within the OPCW, which contained assertions that were excluded from the final report on chemical weapons attacks in Douma. Then there was this piece by former Guardian Chief Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Steele outlining how internal OPCW whistleblowers have undermined the official report on chemical weapons attacks in Syria:
Initially, there was a leaked internal report from within the OPCW, which contained assertions that were excluded from the final report on chemical weapons attacks in Douma. Then there was this piece by former Guardian Chief Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Steele outlining how internal OPCW whistleblowers have undermined the official report on chemical weapons attacks in Syria:
Then there was a leaked internal email from OPCW staff expressing "grave concern" over how he was "struck by how much it misrepresents the facts." It appears as if the OPCW deliberately misrepresented its conclusions in the final report on Douma.Claims that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons are almost as old as the Syrian civil war itself. They have produced strong reactions, and none more so than in the case of the alleged attack in April last year on the opposition-controlled area of Douma near Damascus in which 43 people are said to have been killed by chlorine gas. The United States, Britain and France responded by launching airstrikes on targets in the Syrian capital.
Were the strikes justified? An inspector from the eight-member team sent to Douma has just come forward with disturbing allegations about the international watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was tasked with obtaining and examining evidence.
Involved in collecting samples as well as drafting the OPCW’s interim report, he claims his evidence was suppressed and a new report was written by senior managers with assertions that contradicted his findings.
The inspector went public with his allegations at a recent all-day briefing in Brussels for people from several countries working in disarmament, international law, military operations, medicine and intelligence. They included Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on Palestine and Major-General John Holmes, a distinguished former commander of Britain’s special forces. The session was organised by the Courage Foundation, a New York-based fund which supports whistle-blowers. I attended as an independent reporter.
The whistle-blower gave us his name but prefers to go under the pseudonym Alex out of concern, he says, for his safety.
He is the second member of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission to have alleged that scientific evidence was suppressed. In May this year an unpublished report by Ian Henderson, a South African ballistics expert who was in charge of the mission’s engineering sub-team was leaked. The team examined two suspicious cylinders which rebels said were filled with chlorine gas. One cylinder was found on the roof of a damaged building where over two dozen bodies were photographed. The other lay on a bed on the upper floor of a nearby house below a hole in the roof. The inspectors were able to check the scene because Syrian troops drove rebel fighters out of the area a few days after the alleged gas attack.
Assessing the damage to the cylinder casings and to the roofs, the inspectors considered the hypothesis that the cylinders had been dropped from Syrian government helicopters, as the rebels claimed. All but one member of the team concurred with Henderson in concluding that there was a higher probability that the cylinders had been placed manually. Henderson did not go so far as to suggest that opposition activists on the ground had staged the incident, but this inference could be drawn. Nevertheless Henderson’s findings were not mentioned in the published OPCW report.
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