2018 Syrian Gas Attack

The Syrian Civil War has been raging since 2012. The conflict has numerous factions and rivalries, including the Syrian Arab Republic led by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) or Rojava and other various militias. Throughout the decade long conflict there have a number of claimed chemical attacks which have resulted in the deaths of an uncertain number of Syrian people.

The deadliest claimed attacks were the August 2013 sarin attack in Ghouta which killed hundreds and injured thousands, the April 2017 sarin attack in Khan Shaykhun which is alleged to have killed 89 people, and the April 2018 claimed chemical attacks in Douma, which allegedly killed 43 people and injured 500 more.

The official version of events says that Syrian President Assad was responsible for these attacks. Assad denies involvement and claims that if the attacks happened they were the result of rebel groups on the ground, not the Syrian Air Force dropping chemical weapons.

We don’t have the space in this report to fully examine each of these claims so we are going to focus on the 2018 Douma chemical attacks. It these claimed attacks where Americans and people around the world were shown images of women and children foaming at the mouth after allegedly being exposed to toxic chemicals. It was the images of dead children which led then President Donald Trump to join with France and the United Kingdom to drop bombs on Syria on April 14, 2018. Without waiting for a proper investigation, President Trump ordered the United States military to drop more than 100 Tomahawk missiles on Damascus.

On April 16, two days after the alleged gas attacks, several journalists gained access to Douma and interviewed residents in the area. One of these journalists was Robert Fisk, two-time winner of the British Press Awards’ Journalist of the Year prize and a seven-time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign Correspondent of the Year. Fisk is a longtime foreign correspondent who the New York Times referred to as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” and The Guardian called him “one of the most famous journalists in the world.”

Writing for The Independent, Fisk described the situation in Douma:

This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks–and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world– despite all the doubters–is perfectly genuine.

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.

According to the doctor Fisk spoke with, Dr. Assim Rahaibani, the international organization commonly known as The White Helmets had a role in carrying out the false or exaggerated scene depicting a chemical gas attack.

I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night–but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia–not gas poisoning.

At the same time that Fisk was interviewing the doctor and residents, Pearson Sharp of One America News stated he interviewed between 30 to 40 residents of Douma. As with Fisk, Sharp says he found no evidence of chemical attack and the residents he spoke with seemed completely unaware of the apparent incident.

There was also a report from German news station ZDF which claimed the attacks were staged. While speaking on ZDF Huete, ZDF correspondent Uli Gack reportedly stated, “People told us in a very convincing manner that this whole story was staged.” According to translations of Gack’s commentary, he also noted that “the militants brought canisters containing chlorine to the area”.

Critics of these claims say that the witnesses may have been threatened or coached by Syrian or Russian government officials. In fact, some saw the presence of the Russian military police as a sign that some witnesses may have been tampered with or instructed what to say to the incoming foreign press.

However, discrepancies in the story of the Syrian gas attacks don’t end there. In May 2019, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) published a document signed by a man named Ian Henderson, an expert inspector with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as far back as 1998 and as recently as 2018. The report concludes that “The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder being delivered from an aircraft.” Instead, they believed a manual placement of the cylinders in the locations investigators found them in is “the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”

In November 2019, WikiLeaks began releasing leaked documents from the OPCW, including publishing an internal email written by a member of the OPCW fact-finding mission to Syria. The documents make clear that the OPCW report published in July 2018 which found Assad was responsible for the attacks was shaped to conform with the public allegations made by the US, UK and France. British Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens reported on the OPCW emails, noting that the doctoring of the OPCW fact-finders’ report “appears to be the worst instance of ‘sexing-up’ in support of war since the invasion of Iraq and Tony Blair’s doctored dossiers.”

The email shows an OPCW investigator contacting OPCW Chief of Cabinet Robert Fairweather and his deputy, Aamir Shouket, on June 22, 2018, to raise “grave concern” about details that had been excluded from or changed in the soon-to-be-published redacted report on the agency’s investigation into the alleged gas attack. He wrote that the redacted report had strayed so far from the evidence collected that it “no longer reflects the work of the team.”

The email highlights statements that misrepresent the evidence collected in the on-the-spot investigation, including the assertion that the team had found “sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical, was likely released from cylinders.” Another claim in the official report, that “high levels” of chlorinate organic derivatives were detected at the site of the alleged attack, was also false. According to the investigator, these chemicals were found in trace amounts as a low as 1–2 parts per billion.

In December 2019, journalist Tareq Haddad resigned from Newsweek after he said his attempts to “publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason”.

“I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct,” Haddad said. “I plan on publishing these details in full shortly. However, after asking my editors for comment, as is journalistic practice, I received an email reminding me of confidentiality clauses in my contract. I.e. I was threatened with legal action.”

I interviewed Haddad shortly after his resignation and he explained to me that he believed the story of the OPCW leaks was newsworthy but his editor and publisher sought to prevent the story from being seen by the public.

Thanks to the work of Tareq Haddad and independent journalists the story of the OPCW leaks and the lies surrounding the alleged chemical attacks have not been forgotten. Another outlet and journalist responsible for keeping this story alive is The Grayzone and Aaron Maté. In September 2020, Maté spoke at the United Nations Security Council on the OPCW’s ongoing Syria scandal.

In his remarks, Aaron calls this “one of the most important, and overlooked, global stories in recent memory” and urges the UN and OPCW to let the OPCW inspectors air their concerns, and present the evidence that was suppressed. In March 2023, Mate once again spoke at the UN Security Council about the continuing coverup of the OPCW leaks and the lies of the Syrian civil war.

The Grayzone has consistently been one of the few outlets covering the updates on the OPCW scandal over the years, including testimony by former OPCW investigator Ian Henderson in January 2020, and an interview with former OPCW chief José Bustani where he defends the whistleblowers who challenged a cover-up of their Syria probe.

The fact of the matter is that once again, governments and intelligence agencies, and their friends in the corporate media lied to the public over and over in order to craft a false narrative and perception.

What can we do when governments and intelligence agencies perpetrate such horrendous actions? How do we move foward knowing that these institutions believe it is acceptable to use human lives as pawns in their geopolitical games? Are there any solutions for such a harrowing attack on humanity?