Look, there seems to be some confusion floating around out there about Bashar al-Assad and chemical weapons.
One of the rather amusing arguments that’s making the rounds goes something like this: surely Assad wouldn’t be so stupid as to gas a bunch of people and risk enraging the international community just when it looks like everyone has acquiesced to the inevitable conclusion that ousting him from power is going to be well nigh impossible.
It’s Friday afternoon, and everyone is tired, so were not going to put you through the intellectual wringer. Rather, let’s just briefly think about this and call Syria’s six-year-ish civil war what it is: a bloody free-for-all.
The argument outlined briefly above assumes there’s a whole lot of deep strategizing going on over there. This is a melee. Keep in mind the sheer number of combatants involved. There’s the Alawite government and its forces. There’s Russia. There’s the IRGC. There’s Hezbollah. There’s ISIS. There’s any number of Sunni factions ranging from Fateh al-Sham Front (the band formerly known as al-Nusra) to more “moderate” rebels. There’s the Kurds. There’s US spec ops. There’s Turkey. You get the idea.
No one is sitting around thinking really hard about what the next move should be. This ceased to be a chess game a long time ago. And even if you’re inclined to think that Assad is thinking two or three steps ahead, one plausible answer to the question “why would he risk it?” is this: because he’s backed by Moscow and Tehran and so far, nobody has been real keen on crossing the Kremlin aside from Erodgan which isn’t surprising because he’s out of his mind.
So whatever you choose to believe, don’t buy the “Assad would never do that” argument. If he didn’t do it, it most assuredly wasn’t because “he would never do that.” If he’s “innocent” this time, it’s just by chance.
So with that in mind, here’s an interesting bit from Foreign Policy which, if nothing else, is at least useful for the chain of command visual.
For the first time since President Barack Obama declared in August 2012 that the use of chemical weapons constituted a “red line,” the United States has responded militarily to the Syrian government’s use of these weapons. On the night of April 6, the U.S. military fired a salvo of 59 cruise missiles at Syria’s Shayrat air base, in response to a deadly chemical attack launched from that base earlier in the week. The chemical attack on the northwestern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, according to first responders on the scene, caused at least 84 deaths and injured more than 500 more.
In announcing the strike, President Donald Trump said, “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
While the strike on Khan Sheikhoun was the deadliest chemical attack since the Syrian government launched rockets filled with sarin nerve agent into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013 – killing more than 1,400 men, women, and children – it is far from the first attack since that massacre. Since 2014, rebel-held sections of Idlib, Hama, Aleppo, and elsewhere have been subjected to at least 120 chemical attacks, mostly by helicopters armed with barrel bombs filled with the toxic chemical chlorine. While these attacks were terrifying for the local populace, they rarely caused mass fatalities.
The attack on Khan Sheikhoun was significant not only for the high number of deaths but also for its use of a far deadlier type of chemical weapon. According to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the United States has “very high confidence” that sarin was used in the strike. Although this has not yet been independently confirmed, the victims’ symptoms and autopsies are consistent with poisoning by a nerve agent such as sarin.
If the chemical agent used in this attack was indeed sarin, it would either confirm suspicions that the Syrian regime did not destroy its entire chemical weapons stockpile as promised when it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 2013 or that it has resumed production of these weapons in violation of the treaty. Either way, this latest attack vividly demonstrates that Syria, despite being a member of the CWC, maintains a well-organized capacity to conduct multiple types of chemical attacks in support of the regime’s tactical and strategic objectives.
While the U.S. cruise missile strike targeted one link in the Syrian chemical weapons kill chain, it did not break the chain. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster recognized as much when he told reporters in the aftermath of the strike: “Obviously, the regime will retain a certain capacity to commit mass murder with chemical weapons beyond this airfield.”
Syria’s chemical weapons attacks are not the work of a mere handful of people – an entire political, military, and scientific apparatus is responsible for orchestrating them. As Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, put it, “While their names may be unfamiliar, their brutality is infamous, so they should be as well.”
Based on information released by the U.N., the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), nongovernmental organizations, and the U.S. and European governments, it is possible to construct a picture of the Syrian government’s entire chain of command involved in the research, production, weaponization, planning, and delivery of chemical weapons. The Syrian chain of command for chemical weapons is composed of four tiers: the senior leadership, which is responsible for authorizing the use of these weapons and providing strategic guidance on their employment; the chemists, who produce, transport, and prepare the chemical weapons for use; the coordinators, who provide intelligence on targets and integrate chemical weapons with conventional military operations; and the triggermen, who deliver the weapons to their targets. Together, these individuals and organizations form a chemical weapons kill chain that has so far claimed roughly 1,500 lives and caused more than 14,000 injuries.
History says that civil wars don’t take the weekend off