U.S. officials said the administration could provide the rebels with a range of weapons, including small arms, ammunition, assault rifles and a variety of anti-tank weaponry such as shoulder-fired remote-propelled grenades and other missiles. However, a final decision on the inventory has not been made, the officials said.
The purpose of the meeting was to agree upon a conditioning program to prepare the public for the likelihood that Bashar Al-Assad’s forces would use chemical weapons. Shortly after the meeting, Al Arabiya began running news segments depicting the inevitability of a chemical weapons attack carried out by Assad’s forces.
An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian-corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power.
Phil
We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.
We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have. They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?
Kind regards
David
The video (see here) starts with several scenes showing chemical containers with Tekkim labels (Tekkim is a Turkish chemicals company) and some lab equipment, while playing Jihadists chants in the background. A glass box then appears with two rabbits inside, with a poster on the wall behind it reading The Almighty Wind Brigade (Kateebat A Reeh Al Sarsar). A person wearing a lab mask then mixes chemicals in a beaker in the glass box, and we see some gas emitting from the beaker. About a minute later, the rabbits start to have random convulsions and then die. The person says: You saw what happened? This will be your fate, you infidel Alawites, I swear by ALLAH to make you die like these rabbits, one minute only after you inhale the gas.
The recording of the phone conversation purports to be between two FSA militants, one inside Syria and one outside of the country. Abu Hassan, the militant inside Syria, asks the person on the other end of the line to transmit a message to Sheikh Suleiman, a rebel-seized army base in Aleppo, asking for “two chemical bombs ….phosphoric” in order to “finish this whole thing.”
“I want them to be effective,” states Hassan, adding, “The radius of the strike, or reach of the gases, has to be 1km.”
The Syrian military is said to believe that a home-made locally-manufactured rocket was fired, containing a form of chlorine known as CL17, easily available as a swimming pool cleaner. They claim that the warhead contained a quantity of the gas, dissolved in saline solution. . . .
CL17 is normal chlorine for swimming pools or industrial purposes. It is rated as Level 2 under the chemical weapons convention, which means it is dual purpose - it can be used as a weapon as well as for industrial or domestic purposes. Level 1 agents are chemicals whose sole use is as weapons, such as the nerve agents sarin or tabun.
There has been extensive experimentation by insurgents in Iraq in the use of chlorine, which is harmful when mixed with water to form hydrochloric acid. It vapourises quickly, meaning that in a big explosion it will evaporate; in a small blast - for instance, one delivered by a home-made rocket - it will turn into airborne droplets before dispersing quickly.
So it is likely only to produce limited casualties. In this case there were only 26 fatalities, far fewer than would be expected from a full chemical weapon attack. In short, it is easily improvised into a chemical device but not one that would be used by an army seeking mass-casualty effects. [emphasis added]