Russian Foreign Ministry officials today criticized the UN report on chemical weapons use in Syria, saying that they were disappointed in the report’s tentative nature and its politicized tone.
The report was released Monday, confirming sarin gas use at the site and offering some limited conjecture on the nature of the attack, but making no attempt to assign blame or provide a complete narrative of what happened.
The report, such as it was, ended up being seized upon by everybody as vindication of their respective narratives, and the lack of specificity within the report certainly left a lot of room for interpretation.
UN officials defended the report, and angrily condemned Russia for its comments, saying it had the “fullest confidence” in the report’s authors and that the report “speaks for itself.”
Which it does, but not very clearly. The report was very limited in its conclusions, and the data seemed to offer a lot of conflicting indications, with no real effort to reconcile those points.
The UN says the report is “indisputable,” but since it doesn’t draw any real conclusions that’s not a particularly meaningful statement. The Russian government has promised to present new evidence to the UN of possible rebel culpability in the attack.
Once again the warmongers wanted for UN to legitimize their lies about Syria, like they did in Iraq, to start another war in Middle East, this time Russians and other nations are wide awake reading the scheme of the west and by the west.
The UN with it Secretary General is just a tool of the west.
That sarin gas was used hasn't really been disputed. The dead bodies have been known to be proof of that for some time now. The very critical question has been about who used it. That has been in serious dispute, with the US/UK/France/Israel faction apparently unable to provide any proof to their claims that it was the Assad government. Russia and others have been providing more proof behind their assertions that it was actually the rebels/Al-Qaida that had used sarin gas.
My reading of the UN report suggests that while there is a lot of evidence that a chemical weapons attack was made on the Zamalka neighborhood in the east of Damascus, the evidence for another attack on Moadamiyah in the southwest is much more thin. No sarin was found in any of the environmental samples from Moadamiyah. It seems possible to me that a number of sarin-exposed individuals might have been transported to Moadamiyah, for legitimate or nefarious reasons, before the UN team began taking biomedical samples. Only 4 detailed interviews were conducted with symptomatic people in Moadamiyah and 24 in Zamalka. Only 1 person in Moadamiyah had a detailed interview about what occurred in that area on August 21, i.e., n=1 on that question. I conclude that taken together, the data in the UN report do not support the UN team's conclusion that a chemical weapons attack on Moadamiyah definitely occurred. This implies in turn that there is no basis for any conclusions made by other analysts based on two intersecting flight paths. There may have been only one flight path, from the west-northwest to Zamalka. The Zamalka attack could have been launched from government-controlled territory or territory controlled by neither side.