Syrian Air Force May Have Dropped Chlorine Bomb On Town in Opposition Area in 2018, Says Watchdog

The global chemical weapons watchdog has “reasonable grounds to believe” that Syria’s air force dropped a chlorine bomb on a residential neighborhood in the opposition-controlled Idlib region in February 2018, a report released on Monday said.
There
was no immediate comment from the Syrian government. Syria and its military
ally Russia have consistently denied using chemical weapons during President
Bashar al-Assad’s decade-old conflict with opposition forces, saying any such
attacks were staged by opponents to make Damascus look like the culprit.
The
new report by the OPCW chemical weapons watchdog’s investigative arm said no
one was killed when the cylinder of chlorine gas, delivered in a barrel bomb,
hit the Al Talil neighborhood in the city of Saraqib in February 2018, Reuters
reported.
However,
a dozen people were treated for symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning,
including nausea, eye irritation, shortness of breath, coughing and wheezing,
it said.
Chlorine
is not an internationally banned toxin, but the use of any chemical substance
in armed conflict is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, the
implementation of which is overseen by the OPCW watchdog based in The Hague.
In
April 2020, the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) concluded
that Syrian warplanes and a helicopter had dropped bombs containing chlorine
and sarin nerve gas on a village in Syria’s Hama region in March 2017.
The
latest report by the IIT also implicated Syrian regime forces. It concluded
that “there were reasonable grounds to believe that at least one cylinder
filled with chlorine was dropped from a helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air
Forces, belonging to the Tiger Forces.”
The
Tiger Forces are an elite Syrian military unit generally used in offensive
operations in the war, which has largely subsided with Assad having wrested
back most territory with crucial Russian and Iranian support.
“All elements indicated the presence
of Tiger Forces in the vicinity of Saraqib. They found that a helicopter was
just flying above the bombed area at the moment of the gas release,” a summary
of the OPCW report said.
It
said that samples collected from the scene were examined and other possible
means of chlorine contamination considered, but the OPCW team said nothing was
found to indicate that the incident was staged by Assad’s adversaries.
The
team identified individuals believed to be involved in the alleged attack but
did not release them.
Between 2015 and 2017, a joint United Nations-OPCW team known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) found that Syrian government troops had used the nerve agent sarin and chlorine barrel bombs on several occasions, while ISIS militants were found to have used mustard gas.