Vocativ has spoken to an eyewitness in Syria’s death zone who has given a detailed description of United Nations efforts there to find hard evidence of chemical weapons before it’s too late.
He also claims that prior to the U.N. team’s arrival, the Syrian opposition smuggled samples out of the country and handed them over to the U.N. and possibly a foreign intelligence organization.
According to this source, who is from the opposition-controlled city of Erbin, U.N. inspectors on Monday toured a hospital outside Damascus, taking samples from patients and examining an exploded rocket shell that was possibly once loaded with poison gas.
The inspectors took samples of blood, water and fuselage in a race against time to try and confirm opposition claims that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime targeted several suburbs of Damascus on Aug. 21 with chemical weapons, killing hundreds of people.
Traces of chemical weapons—whether in water, blood, soil, or tissue—erode quickly over time, scientists and U.N. officials say.
The claim by Vocativ’s source that samples were smuggled out of Syria shortly after the attack comes on the same day that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry leveled strong words at Syria and Assad. Kerry said unequivocally that chemical weapons had been used in the attack.
“This is about the large-scale indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilized world long ago agreed should never be used,” Kerry said.
The Syrian government has denied any use of chemical weapons and has accused rebels of using the claims as a media ploy.
The U.N. inspectors were already in Syria when the purported chemical attack took place last week. The team was inspecting the sites where several other alleged chemical weapons attacks have occurred over the past six months.
As the U.N. team made its way to the Damascus suburb Mouadhamiya on Monday, they faced sniper gunfire and were forced to temporarily halt the mission. They later made it to Mouadhamiya to perform their mission.
Secretary Kerry’s statement Monday was the first and clearest indication the U.S. was weighing military action in Syria, a development that would be accepted by rebels and some residents. Vocativ’s source near Damascus said Syrians now “welcome military intervention. People are in a bad psychological state.”
Sgt. Ibrahim Asslan, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, an armed opposition group, told Vocativ they were are also ready for international intervention in Syria. “We hope this will be a rapid and effective punishment to stop Bashar al-Assad,” he said.
Meantime, a new Reuters poll shows Americans still widely oppose any action in Syria.
Vocativ’s source described Tuesday’s U.N. visit, to another bombing site, as irrelevant since samples were long ago smuggled out of the country and, as far as most of the international community is concerned, the facts are already in place.
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