Syria: has the nightmare of chemical warfare arrived?

It’s a war. In a time of war if any politician or military commander says the North Pole is cold, get on the next plane and check.

So it is with Syria where, before people outside Syria but inside corridors of power get too carried away about chemical weapons, we would all be well advised to stick with what little can be agreed as fact. And what should also be relied upon as reasonable eyewitness testimony.

So to the facts. It is agreed that the area of the Khan al-Assad  had been fought over with some intensity in recent weeks. Rebel forces have relatively recently taken over the military academy which lies to the edge of the town which is itself just west of Aleppo, Syria’s second city and bitterly fought over.

In a way the area is typical of much of Syria. The army can come in and take ground, but cannot hold it indefinitely on the one hand. Equally rebels are vulnerable to concerted attacks from government forces, on the other.

So goes much of the nation and large areas of the major cities like Homs, Damascus and Aleppo.

There is no conclusive proof chemical weapons were used at all and both sides blame each other for using chemical weapons here for the first time in this war.

What is new is the Damascus government calling for the UN to come in and mount some kind of independent investigation on the ground into what happened. This must be interpreted on two levels at least.

First – it  does what it says on the tin: proves Damascus is utterly convinced this was a rebel attack and the UN from Gen Sec Moon downwards must come in and get the facts straight and fast.

Second, the government knows full well that the chances of the UN wanting or being allowed to assemble such an investigation are very small, the ability to conduct it on the ground with guaranteed safety or even acceptable security, impossible. So Damascus gets to look good in calling for something which it knows cannot and will not happen in all likelihood.

You take your pick.

Happily we can add more. Channel 4 News has spoken to a medical source independently of either rebels or government who did not know we were going to make this contact in advance.

Our source freely admits he is not an expert in chemical weapons but a normal medic.

He says he was on the ground in Khan and personally saw units of the Syrian army medical corps helping soldiers and civilians injured in the attack. The implication is that if it were the government who mounted this attack they did it deliberately or by accident on not just their own civilians but their own soldiers.

If soldiers were indeed killed as the government insists, then presumably post-mortems indicating cause of death will be carried out in due course. I am due to see a senior military commander very soon and can find out whether or not this is the case.

Further, our source says he also saw the victims at a nearby hospital and says in every single case without exception, not one patient or corpse presented any injuries consistent with blast wounds sustained by normal high-explosive: fractures, burns, lacerations etc.

In every case there was simply a range of respiratory failure and coughing fits and fainting by asphyxia through to loss of consciousness and being dead-on-arrival through respiratory failure.

Our medic is experienced in the trauma injuries of conventional warfare but has never seen anything like this.

Equally the number agreed by both sides of 26 dead and around 100 injured would not be consistent with the major chemical munitions known to be held in the Syrian arsenal. Experience in both the Iran-Iraq War and in Iraq itself at Halabja under Saddam Hussein shows you would expect mass casualties with deaths in the hundreds or thousands, dependent upon weather conditions.

The government points to videos on YouTube purporting to show the rebels gleefully cooking up noxious chemical munitions for the cameras. But this is amateurish stuff and absurd against the terrifying potential of the Damascus stockpile across the country produced in industrial quantities.

It is also unreliable. To end where we began, this is a war – politics by means of ultra-cynicism. How do we know these videos are not simply black propaganda produced by Assad’s sympathisers to sow the seed that people capable of making children cut the heads off prisoners (rebels did just that) are also capable to wanting to cook up and use chemical weapons.

We don’t know for sure.

But testimony on the ground from a reliable and reasonably neutral source suggests we may, possibly, have moved nearer to the nightmare of chemical warfare in Syria. This much we can know reasonably be clear about.

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