SyriaThe Assad regime’s chemical-weapons kill chain

Published 10 April 2017

“There’s a long list of Syrian officials with blood on their hands — but the culpability goes all the way to the top,” Gregory Koblentz writes in one of the more important analyses of the Assad regime’s strategic use of chemical weapons (“Syria’s Chemical Weapons Kill Chain,” Foreign Policy, 7 April 2017). Koblentz, the author of Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security, explains that the Syrian chain of command for chemical weapons is composed of four tiers: the senior leadership, which authorizes the use of these weapons and provides strategic guidance; the chemists, who produce, transport, and prepare the chemical weapons for use; the coordinators, who provide intelligence on targets and integrate chemical weapons with conventional military operations; and the triggermen, who deliver the weapons to their targets. “Together, these individuals and organizations form a chemical-weapons kill chain,” Koblentz writes.

Documenting evidence of chemical attack // Source: theconversation.com

“There’s a long list of Syrian officials with blood on their hands — but the culpability goes all the way to the top,” Gregory Koblentz writes in one of the more important analyses of the Assad regime’s strategic use of chemical weapons (“Syria’s Chemical Weapons Kill Chain,” Foreign Policy, 7 April 2017). Koblentz, an Associate Professor and Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, is the author, among other books, of Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Cornell University Press).

Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

For the first time since President Barack Obama declared in August 2012 that the use of chemical weapons constituted a “red line,” the United States has responded militarily to the Syrian government’s use of these weapons. On the night of April 6, the U.S. military fired a salvo of 59 cruise missiles at Syria’s Shayrat air base, in response to a deadly chemical attack launched from that base earlier in the week. The chemical attack on the northwestern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, according to first responders on the scene, caused at least 84 deaths and injured more than 500 more.

In announcing the strike, President Donald Trump said, “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

While the strike on Khan Sheikhoun was the deadliest chemical attack since the Syrian government launched rockets filled with sarin nerve agent into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013 — killing more than 1,400 men, women, and children — it is far from the first attack since that massacre. Since 2014, rebel-held sections of Idlib, Hama, Aleppo, and elsewhere have been subjected to at least 120 chemical attacks, mostly by helicopters armed with barrel bombs filled with the toxic chemical chlorine. While these attacks were terrifying for the local populace, they rarely caused mass fatalities.