An advance team of four experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have arrived in Syria, at the invitation of the Syrian and Russian governments. A second team arrives today (13th April) and all are to start work tomorrow, Saturday 14th April.
They are to investigate claims of an attack using chemical weapons on 7th April, which the US, UK and France, from thousands of miles away, immediately accused the Syrian government of carrying out. This in spite of the fact that, unlike the US, UK and Israel, all Syria’s chemical weaponry – much sold to them by Western countries – were shipped out of the country in 2013, under OPCW supervision with other international observers present.
The OPCW team has been told:
“they can go anywhere they want in Douma.”
“We will facilitate the arrival of the team to anywhere they want, in Douma, to check whether or not there was use of chemical substances,” said Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s envoy to the UN in New York. …
(Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, April 13, 2018)
…
Syria and Russia both requested an FFM team to be dispatched after opposition groups claimed that the Syrian army executed a chemical weapons attack there, alleging there were scores of deaths and hundreds of casualties.
Both countries have claimed that the incident was “staged” with the purpose of galvanizing Western rebel backers after the US earlier announced that it was planning to pull out of Syria, and they say that there may not have been any chemical use at all.
In a television interview on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “that chemical weapons were used [in Douma] at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad,” but he did not disclose the nature of the evidence.
A day earlier, the US said that it was “still assessing intelligence” and that it was “confident” that Damascus was involved.
The FFM experts, whose mission was set up in 2014, are not entitled to place responsibility for the incident on either side, but they are expected to say if and what chemicals were used, and how they were disseminated.
