For the last one year, the Syrian government has been accused of using chemical weapons on its opponents. In order to ascertain the truth, a 20-member UN team has gone to Damascus to sift the evidence. Within a few hours of the team’s arrival, a massive chemical weapon attack was carried out in the suburbs of Damascus that has so far killed 755 people, the majority of them women and children. The US-led western countries consider the use of poison gas a ‘red line’ crossed, which could they hope justify direct military intervention. If proved, it could trigger the provisions of the UN Security Council’s Responsibility to Protect Resolution that concerns protection of civilians in armed conflict. The resolution allows the international community to intervene for humanitarian purposes when a state fails to protect its people or is responsible for mass murder. The same was done in Libya, when the US could gather enough international support for an intervention in support of the opposition, with China and Russia failing to see through the ruse. However, the western intervention in the Libyan war and the brutality with which Colonel Gaddafi was killed stoked apprehensions about the aggressive US imperialist agenda. In the case of the Syrian conflict, Russia and China had so far stood against any such ‘humanitarian’ intervention. However, the indirect Saudi-aided US-led western intervention through al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents has inflicted heinous crimes on the people of Syria that continue to date. Of late, a series of steady victories over the rebels by the Assad regime, and the allegations of the US about Syria using chemical weapons against civilians have been mounting in tandem. This ‘coincidence’ had raised suspicions then, just as the coinciding of the UN team’s arrival for the investigation of past gas attacks and the occurrence of the new gas attack have raised suspicions now. The timing, the lack of logic and necessity to use chemical weapons strengthens the argument that probably it was a provocation by opposition forces intended to implicate the Syrian regime.
The Syrian government has denied using chemical warfare and has dismissed the allegation as fabricated. The US, Russia and China have called for an independent investigation by UN experts. There cannot be any action unless and until the investigation report verifies the perpetrators of the crime. The Syrian war has taken many forms; from a civil war it came to be categorized as a sectarian conflict where a Shia-dominated ruling party was blamed for using excessive force against its Sunni-majority population. A new stage in this conflict appears to be in the making, which will further plunge Syria into complete chaos through so-called ‘humanitarian’ intervention. *