Eurasia Press & News
After the release of a UN report, Turkey claimed to be certain that the chemical weapons attack in Damascus on Aug. 21 was committed by the Syrian regime, both in a written statement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Tuesday’s statements from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
Saying that Turkey’s intelligence agencies have obtained information confirming that the Syrian regime was behind the chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on Aug. 21, which killed more than 1,700 and injured many more, Davutoğlu expressed his opinion that the UN report indicates the regime’s responsibility in his televised interview on Tuesday.
The UN inspection team released its report on the use of chemical weapons on Monday, confirming that the sarin nerve agent was used in the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus. The UN report did not say who launched the attack, while some countries have interpreted information from their intelligence sources to place responsibility on the Syrian government. The inspection team was only able to reach the area five days after the attack due to a long wait for permission from the Syrian government.
“While we [US Secretary of State John Kerry, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and British Foreign Secretary William Hague] were in Paris, the UN inspection team’s report was released. It definitely states that this [chemical attack on Aug. 21] could only have been done by the Syrian regime,” Davutoğlu said.
When asked why there is no assessment of whether the regime was responsible in the UN report, Davutoğlu affirmed that the report does not place responsibility for the chemical attack, but added that this was not the inspection team’s assignment. Noting that the inspection team is not authorized to make political comments and has no mandate to specify the perpetrator of the attack, Davutoğlu said that unspecified technical details in the report pointed to the Syrian government’s culpability and added, “The report’s silence about the perpetrator doesn’t mean that the perpetrator is not known.”
Noting that the chemical weapons used on Aug. 21 were extremely advanced, the Turkish foreign minister claimed that when the findings of the UN report, the location of the weapons, the launch method and the inscriptions on the missiles — which were written in Russian — are taken into account, there is no doubt about who was responsible for the attack.
