French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has said that laboratory tests have confirmed use of the nerve agent Sarin in the Syrian Civil War.
The White House again said that more proof was needed because the French scientists did not indicate where the gas was used or who used it. The U.N. stated earlier that “reasonable grounds” have been established for claiming the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. Continue reading
In light of reports that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons on civilians and that military troops are carrying out summary executions of suspected rebels without trial, the U.S. is considering supplying arms to the Syrian rebels.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters that for the first time the U.S. is no longer ruling out the possibility of arming the rebels. Last year, President Obama had rejected a similar proposal from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Arming the rebels, that’s an option,” Hagel said during a press conference. “You look at and rethink all options. It doesn’t mean you do or you will. These are options that must be considered with the international community.”
A European Union ban on arming the rebels expires in a few weeks and Hagel’s British counterpart, Philip Hammond, said Britain would be looking at their options after the ban’s expiration.
Sources within the defense department told a BBC reporter that because the U.S. does not want to directly get involved militarily in Syria, arming the rebels is now considered the “least worst option.”
Both Hagel and Hammond stated that despite multiple reports and photographic proof of the Syrian government using chemical weapons, there is still not enough hard evidence to act. Hammond said that because much of the public clearly remembers the weapons of mass destruction claims in 2003 which led to the Iraq invasion, any evidence of chemical weapons would have to come from “very clear, very high quality evidence.”
More than 70,000 have died in the Syrian civil war.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent relief organization has released figures with the United Nations showing that over 2.5 million civilians have been displaced in the country since the start of the nation’s civil war.
UN refugee agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the group’s estimate was “very conservative” and said because of people on the run or in hiding it’s impossible to guess the actual number of people displaced by the war. Continue reading
Human Rights Watch has reported that Syrian government forces are dropping Russian-made cluster bombs on populated areas in an attempt to destroy rebel forces.
Cluster bombs are banned by 77 countries because of the threat they pose to civilian populations in war zones. For example, if a cluster bomb does not completely detonate upon impact, the remaining bombs can act as land mines and explode when picked up or stepped on. Continue reading
In what the BBC described as rebel forces “aiming to cause the biggest psychological as well as physical blow to state presence in” Aleppo, many buildings in the city’s main square were leveled in bomb attacks Wednesday.
At least 33 people were killed in the assault. Continue reading
The Syrian army is moving their chemical weapons for what is being called “security reasons” by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Panetta believes all the weapons caches are still under military control.
“We’ve continued to monitor,” Panetta told CNN. “We are working with countries in the region to ensure that we have the best information possible.” Continue reading
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is reporting that Wednesday marked the bloodiest day of the 18-month-old civil war with 305 people killed in the fighting. SOHR reported that 199 of the dead were civilians.
“If we count the unidentified bodies [which are not counted in official totals,] the figure will be much higher,” Rami Abdel Rahman of SOHR told the BBC. Continue reading
Three children from one family are among the eight dead in air strikes in the city of Aleppo, Syria. Activists are reporting that the government is engaging in a bombardment campaign against civilian areas of the city.
The UN has listed the death toll as more than 20,000 in Syria since March 2011. Activists have put the death toll at near 30,000 adding that 40 people died on Monday from government assaults. Continue reading
At least 30 Syrian civilians who had been lined up to put gas in their cars were killed when a government aircraft bombed the gas station.
Rebel forces told the BBC that civilians had been lined up for gas and diesel fuel when the aircraft dropped a barrel of explosives. The station, 20 miles from the Syria/Turkey border, was the only operating gas station in the region. Continue reading
Civilian casualities in Idlib and Hama have dramatically risen according to Amnesty International’s report that government forces are indiscriminately firing missiles and making air strikes into civilians neighborhoods.
The Amnesty International report says that the international community has not seen the war crimes happening in the two provinces because media outlets have been focused on the fighting in the larger cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Continue reading