How many chemical attacks will Assad get away with?

Brooklyn Middleton writes in Al-Arabiya English that investigators from the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have reportedly found Bashar Assad’s regime guilty of carrying out at least two chlorine bombing attacks over the course of the last two years, marking the first such time the UN has identified parties responsible for continued chemical weapon attacks in Syria. 

Middleton goes on ton say that now that “the UN has begun to confirm precisely what Syrians who have actually lived through such horror have repeatedly alleged, the report presents an opportunity to hold the regime responsible for this specific type of brutality being committed against the Syrian people.”

It is likely that those who have lived through chlorine barrel bombings did not need confirmation of which party – the only one with an airforce – was ultimately determined to be responsible by the UN, Middleton said, adding that “chlorine attacks are no more horrifying than using starvation as a weapon or systematically bombarding health care facilities.”

Since the chemical weapons deal, which was struck after the regime executed a major Sarin attack in Eastern Ghouta on August 22, 2013, reports have periodically surfaced indicating the Assad regime has either held onto some of its chemical weapons or failed to disclose the location of sites possessing such, the writer emphasized.

Middleton stressed that “one of the most astonishing facts about the deal was that the regime was allowed to self-report its own inventory of chemical weapons; thus, the entire deal was predicated on the supposed honesty of a regime that had just massacred its own people with Sarin. Meanwhile, the regime has continuallyexecuted chlorine attacks against civilians with total impunity, including as recently as this month when a mother and her two children suffocated to death in Zebdiya.”

“Thus far, no report – by the UN itself or any other aid organization - has prompted any action or the serious threat of action against the regime. Shamefully, this latest report – like the myriad others that have documented atrocities carried out by the Assad regime – will likely be filed away and possibly viewed at a date when better geopolitical circumstances permit,” Middleton said.

The writer concludes that it is possible that in the long term, the report will pave the way for “formal war crime charges against the regime,” but in the meantime, it could be that the regime “will continue carrying out chlorine attacks with no fear of being punished for doing so, and that if this apparent confirmation of the regime’s culpability in chemical warfare does indeed go ignored, it will further reiterate to the regime that its military has no reason to “ever fear any previously set red lines and that no outside party will act to protect Syrian civilians.”