UN rejects Syria regime chemical attack claims

A UN watchdog said there were no reasonable grounds to claims from the Syrian regime that chemical weapons had been used against its soldiers.

Damascus had alleged that a "mortar attack with poisonous gas" had targeted its soldiers twice in Hama governorate’s Kharbit Massasneh in 2017, and reported the alleged incident to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

"Based on the examination of all data obtained and collected and on the analysis of all evidence taken as a whole, the FFM concludes that there are no reasonable grounds to determine that chemicals were used as a weapon in any of the two reported incidents," the OPCW’s Fact Finding Mission (FFM) said in a statement released Tuesday.

The OPCW implements the UN’s Chemical Weapons Convention. Its FFM was established in 2014 to address the allegations of chemical weapons use by the regime.

Bashar al-Assad's regime has been found by independent investigators to have repeatedly used weapons containing chemicals banned by the convention, including chlorine, mustard gas, and sarin during the war sparked by the regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters in 2011.

The chemical weapons watchdog found earlier this year that the regime was responsible for a 2018 chlorine gas attack in Douma that killed 43 civilians.

The mission has found that chemical weapons were used or likely used in 20 instances. Most of the chemical weapons attacks were conducted using chlorine, but mustard gas and sarin have also been used.

Among the Syrian regime's most deadly uses of chemical weapons proven by the OPCW was a sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun in which at least 87 people were killed. The FFM has previously accused the Syrian regime of obstructing its work.

A suspected regime sarin gas attack on the opposition-held suburb of Douma in 2013 killed as many as a thousand civilians.

More than 500,000 people have died as a result of the ongoing war in Syria.

The Syrian regime and militias both allied with and opposed to it have been accused of a whole host of war crimes and other rights violations over the course of the conflict.

Despite this, several countries in the region have moved in recent years to improve ties with the regime.