UN chemical weapons investigators were set on Sunday to begin examining the scene of a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, which had prompted the joint US, French and British strikes against military installations and chemical weapons facilities near the capital, Damascus.
The arrival of the delegation from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) came as the Syrian military announced that it had “purified” the region of eastern Ghouta, of which Douma is a part, after a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians, following years of siege.
“Units of our brave armed forces, and auxiliary and allied forces, completed the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations,” the general command statement said. The regime of Bashar al-Assad refers to all forces opposed to it as terrorists.
The OPCW had said it would continue to deploy to Damascus despite the strikes on the Syrian regime’s installations in the early hours of Saturday morning. “The fact-finding team arrived in Damascus on Saturday and is due to go to Douma on Sunday,” said Ayman Soussan, Syria’s deputy foreign minister.
The OPCW mission will arrive in Douma eight days after the chemical attack, and days after the area fell to the control of Russian military and Syrian government forces. That delay, along with the possibility of the tampering of evidence by the forces accused of perpetrating the attack, raises doubts about what the OPCW’s inspectors might be able to discover.
Russia and Syria had invited the OPCW to investigate the attack in Douma, which they had hoped would stave off the threat of retaliation by the west.
The chemical attack in Douma had been the final stroke in a prolonged bombardment aimed at crushing the rebellion in eastern Ghouta, the last stronghold near Damascus of rebels fighting Assad’s regime. The campaign had drawn fierce condemnation from western diplomats and UN officials, with one describing it as a “monstrous annihilation”.
The attack killed at least 42 people and refocused global attention on the violence in Syria, provoking a pledge of retaliation from Donald Trump. But the retaliatory strikes did little to perturb the Assad regime or its forces, which on Sunday resumed its bombing of regions in central Syria.
“It’s good that there was a response, but the pressure needs to continue,” said one medic who treated the chemical attack victims in Douma. “It doesn’t have to be military, with bombings, but the pressure must continue until the killing stops in all Syria. In the end, everybody wants peace in the entire area, nobody wants the killing, wars, bombing and forced displacement that we suffered to continue.”
State media in Syria have portrayed the strikes by western powers, which the Pentagon said targeted military and chemical weapons facilities, as a “tripartite aggression” – a phrase meant to evoke the campaign by Britain, France and Israel against Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis.
Washington, London and Paris are due on Monday to table a UN resolution calling for an independent investigation into chemical attacks in Syria that would identify the perpetrators of such atrocities, an idea that Moscow has long been opposed to.
The chemical attack was followed in quick succession by a deal in which the local rebel group, Jaish al-Islam, agreed to leave the city, along with the forced exile of thousands of civilians who did not wish to live under Assad’s rule.
Thousands of people left the city on buses bound for opposition-controlled territory in northern Syria, but many decided to remain.
