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U.N. Panel Faults Syria’s Military for Chemical Attack

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A New York Times investigation shows how Syria and its main partner, Russia, have distorted the facts surrounding the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun.

GENEVA — United Nations investigators added their voices on Wednesday to a mountain of evidence of the Syrian military’s responsibility for a chemical attack on a rebel-held town five months ago that left villagers foaming at the mouth and gasping for breath.

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring the six-year conflict in Syria said that Sukhoi 22 aircraft operated by the Syrian Air Force carried out the attack on the village of Khan Sheikhoun early on April 4. It killed at least 83 people, injured close to 300 others and prompted President Trump to order dozens of cruise missile strikes on the airfield from which the jet fighters had launched their attack.

The panel’s findings are the first authoritative statement to pin responsibility for the attack unequivocally on the Syrian government.

Although a number of foreign governments, watchdogs and news organizations, including The New York Times, had concluded that Syrian forces were most likely behind the attack, the latest report — released by a body tasked with investigating violations by all sides in the conflict — carries more weight and will be harder for the Syrian government and its allies to dismiss as politicized.


Moreover, the panel said that Khan Sheikhoun was the site of just one of at least 20 chemical weapons attacks carried out from March 2013 to March 2017 by government forces. (The number of reported, but not confirmed, uses of chemical weapons is vastly higher.)

In March, for example, three people, including a surgeon and two patients, died in an attack on an underground hospital in Idlib Province after a helicopter dropped a barrel bomb that dispensed what appeared to be chlorine gas, the panel found.

“The real significance of the U.N. commission’s report isn’t necessarily its conclusions — these were widely known already — but that its release comes just as the international community is loosening or removing altogether its opposition to Assad’s continued rule,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

He said the report also underscored a failure by the Obama administration to respond effectively when Syria’s military carried out a chemical weapons attack in August 2013, despite President Barack Obama’s having declared the use of chemical weapons “a red line.”

Mr. Obama effectively set aside a military response by asking Congress to decide; he later took credit for an agreement with Russia to remove Syria’s chemical stockpiles — a promise that was not carried out.


The United Nations panel based its conclusion on interviews with 43 victims and witnesses of the attack, logs of aircraft movements, analysis of satellite and photographs, and the findings of a fact-finding mission set up by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which analyzed medical samples from victims. In June, that organization confirmed the use of sarin nerve agent, or similar toxic weapons, in the attack, but it did not assign blame.

The United Nations panel said Syrian jets had dropped three bombs — including what appeared to be a Soviet-era chemical bomb armed with sarin or a sarinlike substance — releasing a cloud of gas. Some victims died in bed and were not found until later that day, the panel said, citing the case of a woman who had returned from the fields to find her four children had died.

Hours after the attack, the panel said, air force fighters returned to carry out a series of strikes on a medical point in Khan Sheikhoun and a civil defense center that were treating gas victims.

The attack occurred as Syrian and Russian forces carried out airstrikes near Khan Sheikhoun, according to Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, the chairman of the International Commission of Inquiry for Syria.

The campaign targeted medical facilities, including the main hospital in the area, reducing the access to treatment for victims of the sarin attack and driving up the number of casualties, the panel said.

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Some of the victims of what United Nations investigators said on Wednesday was a chemical attack by the Syrian military in April in Khan Sheikhoun.Credit...Edlib Media Center, via Associated Press

The panel also reported on Wednesday on other war crimes committed in Syria from March to July, finding that more than 600,000 people were still cut off from food and medical supplies and facing indiscriminate bombardment.

De-escalation zones in Syria, which the country’s warring parties agreed to with Iran, Russia and Turkey at talks in Kazakhstan in May, have led to a reduction in violence in some areas, but violence increased elsewhere as armed groups scrambled to consolidate control of territory.

Government forces and armed groups struck deals for the evacuation of fighters and civilians from seven towns in April and May, but while humanitarian organizations helped some of the movements, the evacuations were forced and as a result amounted to war crimes, the panel said.

Civilians were not consulted on whether they wanted to leave or where they would go. Many left because they feared being jailed or forced into military service — with no guarantee they would be able to return.

The panel expressed deep concern over the mounting civilian toll from airstrikes by a United States-led coalition. It determined that 38 people, including a woman and five children, had been killed in an American airstrike on a group of buildings used for religious meetings in Al Jinah, in western Aleppo Province, in March.

The United States Central Command said in June that the strike had been lawful because it had targeted a meeting of Qaeda operatives, and that only one civilian had died. But United Nations investigators said the United States had failed to take sufficient precautions to protect civilians and that the attack amounted to a gross violation of international law.

The panel’s investigators said the United States had sought to limit collateral damage using 10 bombs that produced minimal blast and fragmentation to hit the building, before following up with two missiles fired by a drone at people fleeing.

But military planners of the attack should have been aware that the building was a religious complex, Mr. Pinheiro said. “The commission has not found any evidence that such an Al Qaeda meeting was taking place,” he said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Panel Links Syria To a Chemical Attack. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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