The United States has concluded that Syria used chlorine gas in an attack against rebels last May, saying Thursday that it was the latest use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad’s government in the eight-year civil war but stopping short of threatening a military response.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Mr. Assad’s government that “we’re going to do everything we can reasonably do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.”
But he said that chlorine attacks amounted to a “different situation” than the suspected use of sarin, a nerve agent, that killed 80 people and provoked missile strikes against a Syrian air base by the Trump administration in April 2017.
One year later, in April 2018, at least 40 people died in a chemical attack that may have involved sarin or chlorine — or possibly elements of both. That galvanized the United States, Britain and France to launch airstrikes against Syrian chemical weapons storage facilities and military depots.
The May 19 rocket attack by the Syrian government near Latakia Province in northwest Syria wounded several civilians.
It was “the latest instance in a long pattern of Assad’s chemical weapons attacks that have killed or wounded thousands of Syrians,” Mr. Pompeo said at a news conference in New York, where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly.
“The United States will not allow these attacks to go unchallenged, nor will we tolerate those who choose to conceal these atrocities,” he said.
Asked how the United States would respond, Mr. Pompeo struck a measured tone. He noted that it took intelligence officials four months to confidently conclude that the attack was a chemical weapons strike and said, “This is different in some sense in that it was chlorine, so it’s a bit of a different situation.”
The production and possession of chlorine is not banned by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. But it is illegal when it is used as a weapon of war.
In 2013, Syria signed an international treaty banning the use and production of chemical weapons and agreed to eliminate its stockpiles. But Mr. Pompeo said the government in Damascus has violated it every year since, and he announced that the United States would provide the O.P.C.W. with an additional $4.5 million for its investigations in Syria.
Also on Thursday, the Treasury Department imposed economic penalties against a subsidiary of a Russian shipping company, three of its executives, and five vessels accused of evading American sanctions to deliver jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria who are assisting Mr. Assad’s government.
The Russian shipping company, Sovfracht-Sovmortrans Group, faced sanctions in 2016 for operating in Ukraine.
Source : Nytimes
