Hans Blix writes: For some weeks the world’s attention has turned from the brutal civil war that continues to rage over much of Syria, and focused instead on the horrible large-scale use of chemical weapons near Damascus – which has now been verified in a report by UN appointed impartial inspectors. After several bewildering political turns, the framework agreed in Geneva by the foreign ministers of the US and Russia may be viable and meet the interest of their own and many other governments – even though it is bitterly denounced by Syrian rebels, who had hoped for strong US military action, and even though there is no consensus on the question of guilt.

Rather than a fast-track, global-police action with the US ignoring the UN security council – and charter – to punish Syria with limited military strikes, we now see Damascus brought on a fast-track to the chemical weapons convention and an accelerated process for those weapons to be declared (within a week), verified by international inspectors and removed from or destroyed in Syria (within the first half of 2014). The executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the security council are, quite properly, to run the process and supervise it.

This “framework” takes the US off a military course that appeared to go against American public opinion, might have been rejected in Congress, and could have led to loss of many lives in Syria and dragged Washington into further armed conflict. Many governments welcomed that, under the framework, the security council is no longer ignored but made the central forum for action and supervision. For Russia, as a permanent council member with a veto, this meant preserved influence. Through the framework, Russia also protected the Syrian government from the loss of military assets that would have been destroyed in punitive strikes. While Moscow reaped praise for preventing armed action, the only price it paid was the destruction of a chemical arsenal that the Syrian government could hardly have used a second time.

What now looks almost like an international “due process” will undoubtedly raise questions. It seems unlikely the Syrian government will seek to obstruct the process and raise a need for enforcement measures, but troublesome practical and political problems will inevitably arise. The reset that has already taken place between the US and Russia in Geneva will be needed to solve such problems. Even more co-operation will be needed between the two, and within the security council, to tackle the much greater challenge of achieving a ceasefire in Syria and a conference to bring about a transitional government.

It is welcome that the US now seems fully aware that Iran is central to this challenge, and that dialogue with Tehran – and not only threats – are needed. In comments made before the final deal was struck, President Obama made clear that Iran will have a place at the conference about peace in Syria. He cautioned Iran that its getting closer to a nuclear weapon is a far larger issue to the US than Syrian chemical weapons, and warned Tehran it should not conclude that the readiness to strike against it was gone. However, Obama also signalled that the deal reached in Geneva showed there is a potential to resolve these issues diplomatically. One would hope this potential will soon be explored. It could improve the atmosphere. [Continue reading…]

C.J. Chivers reports: Details buried in the United Nations report on the Syrian chemical weapons attack point directly at elite military formations loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, some of the strongest findings to date that suggest the government gassed its own people.

The inspectors, instructed to investigate the attack but not to assign blame, nonetheless listed the precise compass directions of flight for two rocket strikes that appeared to lead back toward the government’s elite redoubt in Damascus, Mount Qasioun, which overlooks and protects neighborhoods and Mr. Assad’s presidential palace and where his Republican Guard and the army’s powerful Fourth Division are entrenched.

“It is the center of gravity of the regime,” said Elias Hanna, a retired general in the Lebanese Army and a lecturer on strategy and geopolitics at the American University of Beirut. “It is the core of the regime.”

In presenting the data concerning two rocket strikes — the significance of which was not commented upon by the United Nations itself — the report provides a stronger indication than the public statements of intelligence services of the United States, France or Britain that the Syrian military not only carried out the attack, but apparently did so brazenly, firing from the same neighborhoods or ridges from which it has been firing high-explosive conventional munitions for much of the war.

Looming over a tense capital and outlying neighborhoods bristling with anger and fear, Mount Qasioun is Damascus’s most prominent military position. It is also a complex inseparably linked to the Assad family’s rule, a network of compounds and positions occupied by elite units led by members of the president’s inner circle and clan.

The units based on the mountain are “as close to the Assad regime as it’s going to get,” said Emile Hokayem, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Mr. Hokayem added that theories that the chemicals had been launched by a rebel mole seeking to discredit the government were unlikely because of the solidity and tight control of those units. [Continue reading…]

Human Rights Watch: The UN inspectors investigating the chemical weapons attack on two suburbs in Damascus last month weren’t supposed to point the finger at the party responsible for the killings. But even so, the Sellstrom report revealed key details of the attack that strongly suggest the government is to blame, and may even help identify the location from which the Sarin-filled rockets that killed hundreds of people on August 21 were fired.

In appendix 5 of their report, after describing the size and structure of two rocket delivery systems used, they go one step further and actually reveal the direction some of the rockets likely came from. Using standard field investigative techniques examining the debris field and impact area where the rockets struck, the report provides precise azimuths, or angular measurements, that allow us to work out the actual trajectory of the rockets.

“Impact site number 1 (Moadamiya) and impact site number 4 (Ein Tarma),” the inspectors wrote, “provide sufficient evidence to determine, with a sufficient degree of accuracy, the likely trajectory of the projectiles.” They go on to say that 3 of the rockets they inspected had bearings of 34 and 35 degrees for 2 of the rockets that landed in Moadamiya, and 285 degrees for 1 of the rockets that landed in Ein Tarma.

Connecting the dots provided by these numbers allows us to see for ourselves where the rockets were likely launched from and who was responsible.

The two attack locations are located 16 kilometers apart, but when mapping these trajectories, the presumed flight paths of the rockets converge on a well-known military base of the Republican Guard 104th Brigade, situated only a few kilometers north of downtown Damascus and within firing range of the neighborhoods attacked by chemical weapons.

According to declassified reference guides, the 140mm artillery rocket used on impact site number 1 (Moadamiya) has a minimum range of 3.8 kilometers and a maximum range of 9.8 kilometers. The Republican Guard 104th Brigade is approximately 9.5 km from the base. While we don’t know the firing range for the 330mm rocket that hit impact site number 4, the area is only 9.6km away from the base, well within range of most rocket systems. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Now we know. On the morning of 21 August, as the air above Damascus cooled, rockets filled with the nerve agent sarin fell on rebel-held suburbs of the Syrian capital and left scores of men, women and children dead or injured. UN inspectors had been in the country for three days, on a mission to investigate allegations of earlier atrocities. They quickly changed tack. They brokered a temporary ceasefire with the regime and the rebels and made straight for Ghouta. Video reports from the area showed hospital staff overwhelmed and desperate.

Never before had UN inspectors worked under such pressure and in the midst of a war zone. The small team, headed by the Swedish chemical weapons expert Åke Sellström, was threatened with harm. Their convoy was shot at. But their 41-page report was completed in record time.

Sarin was that breed of accident that scientists come to regret. Its inventors worked on insecticides made from organophosphate compounds at the notorious IG Farben chemical company in Nazi Germany. In 1938, they hit on substance 146, a formula that caused massive disruption to the nervous system. The chemical name was isopropyl methylfluorophosphate, but the company renamed it sarin to honour the chemists behind the discovery – Schrader, Ambros, Ritter and Van der Linde – according to Benjamin Garrett’s 2009 book The A to Z of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare. The chemical they created had the grim distinction of being many times more lethal than cyanide.

Substance 146 is not hard to make, but it is hard to make without killing yourself. There are more than a dozen recipes that lead to sarin, but all require technical knowhow, proper lab equipment and a serious regard for safety procedures. One major component is isopropanol, more commonly known as rubbing alcohol. Another is made by mixing methylphosphonyl dichloride with hydrogen or sodium fluoride. But methylphosphonyl dichloride is not easy to come by. Under the Chemical Weapons Convention it is listed as a schedule 1 substance, making it one of the most restricted chemicals in existence. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The Moscow-Washington tango that resulted in the Syrian chemical weapons agreement was a first-class diplomatic show that will be analyzed by political scientists and pretzel makers for a generation. As always in successful diplomacy, every actor in the spectacle claims victory and national strategic benefits. The complexity of the cause-and-effect debate is what interests the pretzel makers, whose own fine handiwork defies the attempts of rational people to determine with precision where the pretzel starts and where it ends.

The Russian-American agreement on Syria begs analysis and any possible credible answers on three important questions. The first is for academics and historians because it is unlikely to receive a definitive answer: What role did the American threat of the use of force against Syria play in pushing the parties to an agreement?

Arguments on both sides of this question reflect existing ideological positions on issues such as the degree of coherence in U.S. policy in the Middle East and the efficacy and ethics of Washington’s proclivity to use military force unilaterally and at will anywhere in the world. This is a fascinating and important debate because the U.S. will threaten or use force again and again – as President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry both repeated several times in recent days while explaining their policies toward Syria and Iran.

The second key issue to examine now is how the agreement will impact the internal fighting in Syria, and the condition of Syria and Syrians.

I expect fighting to continue unabated across the country, and increase in places, as both sides seek to show that they gained from the accord – while their respective external supporters in the United States, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia will continue to feed them money and guns. Any drop in American aid to rebels will be compensated for by increased Arab Gulf aid.

The third and most important political question that the U.S.-Russia agreement raises is about its likely implications for a set of critical relationships revolving around a central actor in this wider drama–Iran. In the short run two dynamics matter here: American and Russian relations with Iran, and Iranian-Saudi Arabian relations. [Continue reading…]

The Syrian playwright, Mohammed Al Attar, describes the complex relationships between each of the militias and the civilian society in Al Raqqa, 100 miles east of Allepo, the first regional capital in liberated Syria to have experienced some degree of autonomy.

Even though the Assad regime has no control over the city on the ground, it persists in bombing, much of it in the form of explosive barrels, dropped randomly by helicopters. “The explosive barrel is the epitome of meaningless death in a war deliberately launched by the regime against its revolutionary subjects. In the eyes of those being bombed from the air, the missiles fired from fighter jets are a far more honourable weapon. They may be more devastating, but at least you don’t have to sit there waiting for them to drop on you, pointlessly.”

Al Raqqa defies the bombardment in a number of ways. Those who remain (and those who have returned) continue their desperate struggle for daily bread, a struggle that is no simple matter these days. There are a very few public service providers that still receive their salaries from the central government (Communications and Electricity) and others whose salaries have been either totally suspended or that have been paid just once in the last six months (Water and Health for example). These providers of vital services continue to work on a voluntary basis with support from the local council, which itself has extremely limited resources. The other problem currently facing Al Raqqa’s residents is the agricultural sector. There are a number of pressing questions surrounding the fate of limited-income farmers. How can they meet the cost of seed and fertilizer now that the admittedly limited government subsidies have been cut off? The fertilizer that is being imported from Turkey is prohibitively expensive. How will the purchase and distribution of crops be regulated? The civil authorities find themselves burdened with new and weighty responsibilities that the Syrian political opposition has completely failed to deal with. The political opposition has no presence on the ground in Al Raqqa. Effective institutions affiliated with the National Coalition or other groups are nowhere to be found. Certain of its representatives make fleeting visits, but that is all. Confronted with all manner of pressing challenges, it is the local council that shoulders the lion’s share of the burden. There are some praiseworthy initiatives, such as an effort to establish a police force, and a very limited number of these policemen have begun to enforce a traffic system, but its work is limited by the new force’s lack of training, equipment and support for its role. Indeed, it is a decisive test of the city’s ever-present armed brigades and their willingness to keep out of civil affairs. The local council has also revived the city’s municipal offices and started working on keeping the city clean.

But hope rests on the youth and the various civil society blocs they created following the liberation of the city. There are currently forty-one civil society organizations in Al Raqqa and though the scope and effectiveness of their activities varies hugely from one to another, they provide incontrovertible evidence of Syrians’ desire to restore an effective role to civil society. There are groups for rights activists, for the independent media, for teachers and students, for activists from the non-violent protest movement, for those working in development, small-scale economic projects and emergency relief. There are even groups for the theatre and the arts. Some of those who work in these groups were detained two or three times by the regime prior to liberation. It is they who give you hope. Their voices carry a weight that cannot be ignored. Moreover, these groups play a role in maintaining dynamic and flexible relations with the armed groups. These relationships are vital for keeping channels of communication open between the two sides, channels in which personal contacts are of supreme importance. All these forms of interaction are vital to the process of identifying and isolating those who communicate poorly or outright refuse all communication (ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], for instance). These days, Al Raqqa’s residents increasingly tend to distinguish between those who bear arms to continue their struggle against the regime and those who do so to impose a dictatorship of another kind or to triumph in purely local power struggles. All these types are present in Al Raqqa today. Most of the time, public reception is the determining factor in one party gaining the ascendency over others.

Despite their weariness and the difficulties of their daily lives (all of them serious obstacles blocking the revolutionary’s movement’s return to full strength) there are clear indications that the city’s civilian population is unwilling to tolerate these new dictatorial practices. Souad, a primary school teacher, leaves home every evening to demonstrate in various locations around the city, carrying signs that reject ISIS’s behavior and demanding the release of all those they have detained. Souad often goes to stand outside their headquarters, an act of open defiance, prompting some of its members to try and dissuade her from her what she is doing.

On the evening of August 10, in response to the harassment of civilians by members of the Ahrar Al Sham Movement [one of the strongest Syrian Islamist militias and a rival of ISIS], residents gathered together spontaneously, their assembly becoming a fully-fledged demonstration against the actions of the Movement’s members. Some members of the Movement then opened fire to disperse the demonstrators, and the city seethed with rage, only for the Movement to issue a statement hours later in which they declared that the members responsible for the original grievance had been dismissed and those of them who had fled were being pursued to bring them to justice.

A few days later on August 14, when ISIS detonated its car bomb about the headquarters of the Ahfad Al Rasul Brigade in the old train station, civilians attempted to intervene to remove the wounded and allow passage to ambulances. Once more they were dispersed with gunfire from ISIS fighters.

These events take place against a backdrop of rising anger at the ongoing abductions of well-known figures in the city, to which was added the rumour that Father Paolo [a Jesuit priest] had been murdered by his abductors. The rumour was later denied, but confirming any information about the group’s prisoners remains impossible due to the inaccessibility of sources within the group itself. The most recent information concerning Father Paolo was leaked by a mujahid who had left the group and informed those close to him that he had seen Paolo alive at the Al Baath Dam (which is under ISIS’s control) before he was transported to another headquarters in the village of Al Akirshi, near Al Raqqa.

These successive events appear to be indicators of a deepening enmity between Al Raqqa’s civilians and the armed brigades, ISIS in particular. The civilians do not seem to be in a position of strength when it comes to these types of confrontations, yet at the same time they have never before been so determined and set on continuing their struggle. Every single person I met saw themselves as part of a popular and radical revolt that has not yet ended. They had removed a totalitarian and tyrannical regime from their city. Today, they see this achievement as just one step along the long and hard road to their goal: a free, just and proud nation…And they do not look like they will be giving up any time soon.

The Jerusalem Post reports: “Bad guys” backed by Iran are worse for Israel than “bad guys” who are not supported by the Islamic Republic, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post in a parting interview.

Oren, in the interview that is to be published in full on Friday, traced the evolution of Israel’s message on Syria during the three weeks of the chemical weapons crisis.

“The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” he said.

This was the case, he said, even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated to al-Qaida.

“We understand that they are pretty bad guys,” he said, adding that this designation did not apply to everyone in the Syrian opposition. “Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.”

Amid reports that Assad may be moving some of his chemical weapons arsenal out of the country, Oren reiterated Israel’s position that it will not tolerate attempts to transfer these arms – or game changing weapons – to Hezbollah.

“The chemical weapons were an American red line, it wasn’t an Israel red line,” Oren said. “Our red line was that if Iran and Syria try to convey chemical weapons or game changing weaponry to Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations, that Israel would not remain passive. We were prepared to stand by the red line, and still are.” [Continue reading…]