patrick.net

Four years ago, it almost looked as if chemical attacks on Syrian civilians would stop. “We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” declared then-Secretary of State John Kerry on Meet the Press in 2014.

But there were two important and deadly loopholes. The first was that Assad did not declare everything—a reality that Kerry acknowledged in a farewell memo to staff, in which he wrote that “unfortunately other undeclared chemical weapons continue to be used ruthlessly against the Syrian people.”

The second was that chlorine gas, which has legitimate civilian uses, was not part of the deal. The Syrian American Medical Society and the White Helmets civil-defense group have documented 200 chemical attacks in Syria since 2012, many involving chlorine.

The deal’s failure to prevent attacks like this was evident even before last April, when sarin gas killed roughly 100 people in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun. By then, Assad’s renewed campaign of chemical attacks, involving the use of chlorine in barrel bombs, was well underway.


https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/syria-obama-trump-assad-chemical-douma/557486/