Five years since the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks in Damascus. Here's the first blog post I did on it back when I was still writing the Brown Moses Blog. brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/08/are-th…
Going back through the old posts from the time of the August 21st Sarin attacks it's interesting to see the parallels between how people argued that the opposition was responsible then and how they argued the same thing for the Khan Sheikhuoun 2017 attack and Douma 2018 attack.
It's also interesting to look at the way in which Russia responded to the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks, pulling on claims from the internet, dodgy bloggers, and pro-gvoernemt sources, none of which panned out. What does that remind you of? brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/10/making…
One of Sergey Lavrov's initial claims on the August 21st Sarin attacks was to state "There is information that videos were posted on the internet hours before the purported attack", but this was just an issue with how YouTube displays dates on videos.
Reporting from Reuters has OPCW sources saying the same Sarin was used in Khan Sheikhoun and on August 21st 2013, which the OPCW-UN JIM connected to the Syrian government. uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syr…
Currently we have the same type of Sarin used in 5 Sarin attacks:
March 19 2013 - Khan al-Assal
August 21st 2013 - Damascus
March 24th 2017 - Al Lataminah
March 30th 2017 - Al Lataminah
April 4th - Khan Sheikhoun
Source 1 opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW…
Source 2 uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syr…
March 19 2013 - Khan al-Assal
August 21st 2013 - Damascus
March 24th 2017 - Al Lataminah
March 30th 2017 - Al Lataminah
April 4th - Khan Sheikhoun
Source 1 opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW…
Source 2 uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syr…
Over 5 years ago, Russia provided a report to the UN which claimed rebel forces, specifically the “Basha’ir al-Nasr” brigade using “Basha’ir-3” rockets, were responsible for Khan al-Assal. Despite what must be clear evidence, they've never made it public. thedailybeast.com/its-time-russi…
Russia also claimed "a homemade rocket" "one similar to the rocket used by terrorists on March 19th in Khan al-Assal" was used on August 21st 2013 in Damascus, yet refuse to release their evidence to prove it. A clear case of Russia yet again lying about an atrocity.
As I've written repeatedly, the rockets used on August 21st 2013 have been used by pro-government forces, so any claims they are from rebel forces are completely false. bellingcat.com/resources/case…
We also had half-baked theories from Ted Postol using the amateur analysis of conspiracy theorist @partisangirl, which has been shown by actual experts to be "a naive set of assumptions, based on limited experience in a first-year chemistry laboratory" bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018…
I'll be debating Ted Postol about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack at Goldsmith's University in London on October 20th 2018. Hopefully he's not relying on "cui bono?" and analysis from conspiracy theorists.
