The sarin shells fired on Damascus – by Syrian 4th Division’s 155th Brigade – were followed by rockets on Israel and car bombings in Lebanon
In the space of 48 hours, the Assad regime, Iran and Hizballah launched a three-point offensive against foreign intervention, debkafile reports. Here are some facts: The sarin nerve gas atrocity of Wednesday, Aug. 21, alleged to have claimed more than 1,000 lives, was the work of the 155th Brigade of the Syrian army’s 4th Division, headed by President Bashar Asad’s younger brother Gen. Maher Assad.
The poison gas shells were fired from the big Mount Kalmun army base south of Damascus, one of the three repositories of Syria’s chemical weapons. In response to a demand from Moscow last December, Assad collected his chemical assets in three depots. The other two are Dummar, a suburb 5 kilometers outside Damascus, and the Al-Safira air base, west of Aleppo.
Not a single shell or gram of poison gas is loaded for use at any of the three sites without an explicit directive from the president or his brother.
Therefore, the clamor raised by the US and French presidents, Western prime ministers and Russian leaders for an independent investigation to turn up evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria and identity of its perpetrator – the Assad regime, says the West, and a rebel provocation, according to Moscow – is nothing but playacting. The facts are known and the evidence is present. And the price for refusing to come down to earth and putting an immediate stop to this horrifying precedent may be unimaginably grim – not just for Israel and Jordan – but for the rest of the Middle East and beyond.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented Thursday, Aug. 22 that Iran is using Syria as its testing ground while closely monitoring international responses to its actions.
His remark followed the four Grad rockets fired on northern Israel the day after the chemical attack in East Damascus. His words were scarcely noticed, mainly because Israel’s own spokesmen were busy spreading a blanket of disinformation over the attack, attributing it vaguely to “Global Jihad” (whatever that is).
debkafile’s military sources affirm that, just as the Assad brothers orchestrated the chemical shell attack on Syrian civilians, so too did Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah set in motion the rocket attack on Israel.
By good fortune, the two which exploded in built-up areas caused damage but no casualties and a third was intercepted by Iron Dome.
Nasrallah had his disposal two Palestinian terrorist groups functioning in Lebanon and Syria under direct Iranian command. They are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian – General Command (PFLP-GC) and Jihad Islami – both of them eager to attack Israel.
Then, on Friday night, two car bombs blew up outside Sunni mosques in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli, killing 42 people and injuring 500.
The triple coordinated outrages added up to a dire warning from Tehran and Damascus about what they have in store for the region, and especially Syria’s neighbors, as payback for foreign intervention in the Syrian civil war.
On the subject of intervention, the French daily Le Figaro took the liberty last Thursday, Aug. 23, of lifting wholesale and publishing without credit the exclusive report carried Wednesday, Aug. 21, by debkafile. We were the first publication in the world to reveal on Saturday, Aug. 17 the entry from Jordan into southern Syria of a unit of US-trained Syrian rebel commandoes, under the caption: Reported Syrian gas attack after first US-trained rebel incursion from Jordan.
In that report, debkafile was also the first to expose Assad’s poison gas attack as a warning of the heavy price he would exact for intervention in the Syrian war by foreign forces or by rebels trained by foreign forces – in this case US instructors and officers based in Jordan.
CBS News reported Friday that US and Israel intelligence monitoring known chemical weapons sites detected activity there 20 minutes before the chemical shells were fired Wednesday. Those agencies were therefore on top of valuable advance information, but did nothing to stop – or even warn against – the coming poison gas attack.
Washington and other Western capitals as well as Israel continued to circle around reality Friday and Saturday, when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel let it be known that US warships had been sent to the region for possible cruise missile attacks, in case the president decided on action against Syria.
The Secretary “forgot” to mention that, had the president really wanted to do something, all he had to do was keep the USS Truman aircraft carrier, which was present in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, the day of the chemical attack, from sailing out through the Suez Canal Thursday.
Furthermore, America doesn’t need to send more warships to the region for possible attacks on Syria. It holds plenty of assets at US air and missile bases crisscrossing the Middle East, southern and central Europe and the Persian Gulf. All are fully capable of conducting a variety of operations against Syria without bringing in extra warships.
Except that none of these assets has so far been ordered into action.
What could the Obama administration do if it was so minded?
debkafile’s exclusive military sources described three options available: One: Striking the Syrian unit which perpetrated the poison gas last Wednesday east of Damascus. Two: Destroying the Syrian army’s three chemical weapons depots. Or Three: Coordinated attacks on the first two targets.
For Options Two and Three, the attack would have to destroy all the poison shells at once before they exploded and leaked contamination across wide regions of Syria and neighboring Turkey, Israel and Jordan. The Syrian ruler is capable of having the shells’ contents mixed and armed ready for use ahead of a US attack, thus maximizing the deadly impact of lethal gases across a broad Middle East region.
Notwithstanding the grave risks of action, the consequences of inaction by the US and Israel would be worse: It would give Damascus and Tehran a green light for escalating their viciousness – and not just against the Syrian people. If the barbarity is not stopped, they will get away with making nerve gas and other poison substances acceptable weapons for fighting their foes. Lebanon and Israel are in extreme jeopardy.
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WarSclerotic 
August 24, 2013 at 2:56 PM
Who really knows what happened ? We are never shown any proof either way. Just bragging by everyone that he knows the truth. Clearly, Debka analysts want Syrian chemical weapons destroyed (I agree), and build a story to support that objective. But agains : where are the proofs?
Here is another version that makes just as much sense :
Chemical false flag in Syria repeats pattern of Sarajevo, 1995
http://osnetdaily.com/2013/08/chemical-false-flag-in-syria-repeats-pattern-of-sarajevo-1995/
Editor’s Note…
The recent chemical false flag attack in Syria should be understood in the context of the current NATO plan of carving a territory in Southern Syria via incursions from Jordanian territory. Regional Islamists are the prime suspects, as was the case in the Sarajevo massacre in the mid-1990s which jump started NATO’s malicious onslaught on Serbia, thereby repeating the pattern of collaboration between Trilateral commission influenced democrat party administrations and Al-Qaeda Islamists, in the middle east as well as Europe.
***
World Tribune
In August 1995, Western governments, and particularly the Bill Clinton White House, were in great quandary.
The negotiations with the Serbs were going well as President Slobodan Milosevic was demonstrating unprecedented flexibility and accepting virtually all the demands put forward by the West.
Hence, it was becoming politically and legally impossible for the U.S.-led West to launch the NATO military intervention which President Clinton had promised Bosnia-Herzegovina leader Alija Izetbegovic the U.S. would launch in order to quickly win the war for the Bosnian-Muslims.Then, on Aug. 28, 1995, at around 11:00 hrs local, a mortar shell appeared to hit the Markale market place in Sarajevo, killing 38 people and wounding another 90. Russian Col. Andrei Demurenko, then the commander of UN Forces in Sarajevo, immediately rushed with an UNPROFOR team to the supposed Bosnian-Serb mortar positions and ascertained that none of them could have been used to fire the mortar rounds.
Demurenko’s report stated that the Bosnian-Serb forces were falsely blamed for the attack on the Markale.
Nevertheless, ostensibly in response to the massacre, NATO launched the air campaign against Bosnian-Serb forces and shortly afterwards decided the war in favor of the Bosnian-Muslims.
On Aug. 31, 1995, Jean Daniel, then Editor of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, wrote an article titled “No more lies about Bosnia”. In the article, Daniel recounted an exchange he had just had with French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur about the NATO air campaign and the motivations for it. “They [the Muslims] have committed this carnage on their own people?” Daniel asked. “Yes,” confirmed Balladur without hesitation, “but at least they forced NATO to intervene.”
The Aug. 21, 2013, chemical attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, might become the Markale of the Syrian war.
On Aug. 19, a UN expert delegation arrived in Damascus to study reports and evidence of earlier use of chemical weapons. The next day, they were presented with detailed scientific, technical, and military data about the alleged chemical attacks, soil contamination and why the Syrian Armed Forces could not have carried out these attacks.
Russian and other foreign experts who studied the data separately found it compelling.
The Syrian military also presented the UN team with detailed intelligence evidence about chemical weapons and production labs affiliated with the opposition discovered in Syria, Turkey and Iraq.
On Aug. 21, the Syrian opposition announced a massive chemical attack in Ghouta which allegedly inflicted about 1,300 fatalities including hundreds of children. As in previous chemical attacks blamed on the Assad administration, the attackers used the ubiquitous Sarin nerve gas. Immediately, the opposition flooded Western media with pictures of the dead, but provided no conclusive evidence about the attack and the perpetrators.
Moreover, initial opposition reports claimed the attack was conducted by a barrage of rockets. Subsequently, in the context of renewed outcries for a No Fly Zone, the opposition claimed that the chemical attack was a part of a massive bombing by the Syrian Air Force. Yet, the opposition’s pictures show no casualties suffering shrapnel wounds associated with aerial bombing. Stern denials by the Syrian Government of any involvement in the attack were largely ignored by the West. At the time of writing, the UN expert delegation and foreign diplomats were denied access to the attack site by the opposition forces ostensibly because of fear for their safety.
The context of the attack is of great significance.
Starting Aug. 17 and 18, nominally Free Syrian Army (FSA) units — in reality a separate Syrian and Arab army trained and equipped by the CIA as well as Jordanian and other intelligence services — attempted to penetrate southern Syria from northern Jordan and start a march on Damascus. The U.S.-sponsored war plan was based on the Autumn 2011 march on Tripoli, Libya, by CIA-sponsored army from Tunisia which decided the Libyan war and empowered the Islamists.
Two units, one 250-strong and one 300-strong, crossed into Syria and began advancing parallel to the Golan Heights border. Their aim was to break east and reach Daraa quickly in order to prepare the ground for the declaration of Daraa as the capital of a “Free Syria”. However, the CIA’s FSA forces met fierce resistance by the unlikely coalition of the Syrian Army, local jihadist forces (mainly the locally-raised Yarmuk Brigades), and even tribal units who fear the encroachment by outside forces on their domain. By Aug. 19 and 20, the FSA units were surrounded in three villages not far from the Israeli border.
An attempt to use an Indian UNDOF patrol as human shield failed. The FSA commanders were now (ie: as of late Aug. 21) pleading for massive reinforcements and an air campaign to prevent their decimation.
Meanwhile, on Aug. 19, in Ghouta, more than 50 local opposition fighters and their commanders laid down their arms and switched sides. A few prominent local leaders widely associated with the opposition went on Syrian TV. They denounced the jihadists and their crimes against the local population, and stressed that the Assad administration was the real guardian of the people and their interests. More than a dozen ex-rebels joined the Syrian Government forces.
Hence, the last thing the Assad administration would do is commit atrocities against the Ghouta area and the local population which had just changed sides so dramatically. For the opposition, fiercely avenging such a betrayal and petrifying other would-be traitors is a must. Furthermore, in view of the failure of the march on Daraa and Damascus by the CIA’s FSA forces, there was an urgent imperative for the opposition to provoke a Western military intervention before the rebellion collapsed completely, and Assad consolidated victory.
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August 24, 2013 at 6:21 PM
Assad is not stupid enough to launch chemical weapons. He is winning and would not do something crazy that would allow the west to strike Syria.
Rouge elements of his army? Yes, Rebels? Yes, Assad? No way.
August 24, 2013 at 6:38 PM
Defense…
Allow me to disagree. Perhaps Assad on his own might not have used them. The thinking is that Iran is using this as a test case on the West’s resolve.
In addition, an under reported aspect of the war is the newly US trained and supplied rebels coming in from Jordan.
That, combined with the fact that the chemicals were used on a suburb of Damascus shows that Assad’s victory is far from assured. His seat of government was being threatened.
With Obama clearly unwilling to do anything, why NOT use the chemicals?
While I’m not 100% convinced he gave the order, I no longer believe that there’s no way he could have.
August 24, 2013 at 7:38 PM
You have a point but regardless of what happened I believe action is going to be taken soon:
Israel estimates: High likelihood of US attack in Syria
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4421633,00.html
August 24, 2013 at 8:02 PM
Defense…
I hope it will be real rather than “symbolic” action.
Thanks for the link.
Posted.
August 24, 2013 at 8:30 PM
Indeed, limited strikes will not do much or even makes things a lot worse. Its going to be an interesting few days ahead.
No problem Joe 🙂