On Wednesday, a global chemical weapon organization’s report that the Assad regime used chemical weapons in a 2018 attack in northwestern Syria should come as a surprise to no one, the State Department held.
“The Assad regime is responsible for innumerable atrocities, some of which rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” spokesperson Ned Price said in a declaration.
“These well-documented atrocities include the use of chemical weapons, and this most recent report follows the first devised last year, that attributed three other chemical weapons attacks to the Assad regime,” he further added, denoting to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) Investigation and Identification Team.
On Tuesday, the OPCW announced its concluding report on a now long-established 2018 chemical weapons attack in Saraqib in Idlib governorate. The organization indicating that a military helicopter being used by the Assad government’s air force plunged at least one cylinder filled with chlorine gas.
The cylinder cracked on contact, dispersing the gas on a wide area and affecting 12 individuals, according to the OPCW.
The regime’s use of chlorine as a chemical weapon is a clear violation of its commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which it is a party, as well as UN Security Council Resolution 2118.
“To be clear, no amount of disinformation, conspiracy theories or distortion of the facts by the regime or its enablers can argue away Assad’s crimes. The United States condemns the use of chemical weapons, by anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Price added.
