Why Is Russia making war on the OPCW now?

Russian/Syrian is carpet bombing of Jisr al Shoghour today

First reports speak of 5 killed, 10 wounded.

This is what the OPCW "leak" story is meant to distract us from.

Russia claims that it is the United States government, and not the Syrian government, that is responsible for the chemical attacks that have taken place in Syria in recent years. According to the Syrian Arab New Agency (SANA), Russia will be presenting new evidence to back that claim on Friday. AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA) is reporting:

Moscow to present additional data on alleged chemical attack in Syria's Douma
11 July 2019
Source: SANA
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov announced that Moscow on Friday will present additional data on the alleged chemical attack in Douma City.

”We will soon present additional data gathered by our experts and social activists regarding the Douma incident. As I see it, a relevant presentation will be held in the Hague tomorrow and we will present new data on July 12 and we will invite journalists,” Sputnik Agency quoted Ryabkov as saying in a statement to journalists.

The US through its tools of terrorist organizations and members of the so-called “White Helmets” stage false flag chemical attacks to indict the Syrian Government in an attempt to prevent the inevitable end of terrorists in the face of the Syrian Arab Army and to justify the foreign aggression on Syria. More...

This promise of new allegations from Russia came the day after Anthony Deutsch of Reuters reported that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) would be sending the newly created Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) to Syria to determine who was responsible for nine recent chemical attacks in Syria, including the one that took place on 7 April 2018 in Douma:

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - A new team established by the global chemical weapons watchdog to attribute blame for the use of banned munitions in Syria will investigate nine alleged attacks during the country’s civil war, including in the town of Douma, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Both Russia and Syria opposed the formation of the IIT, or any fault finding mission.

Surveillance video footage taken from a nearby home showing the moments of deliberate #Russia|n bombing on a refugee camp for displaced people in the town of Deir al-Sharqithat on July 9th. The camp was completely destroyed. #MaratAlNuman, #Idlib, #Syria. pic.twitter.com/OHxAlbKrOR

— Umm Qahwah (@UmmQahwah) July 11, 2019

While consistently claiming that the US lead terrorist jihadists are behind every chemical attack in Syria, they have just as consistently opposed any investigation of these attacks with the power to place blame. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of member states to the OPCW voted to give the IIT the power to find fault. Now it is beginning its investigations and has named the CW attacks it will be investigating. And now the Syria government is refusing visas to the IIT investigators, and is refusing to turn over relevant materials to them. This would seem to be very strange behaviour to come from a government that insists none of the evidence should indicate it was responsible for any attack.

This is one reason Russia, and its minions, have been making war on the OPCW. They need badly to discredit it ahead of any finding of the obvious, which is that the same war criminals that have been massacring civilians from the air with conventional explosives, have also occasionally done the same by dropping chemical weapons on them.

The Assad regime turns to chemical weapons because despite claims to the contrary, it is not winning without them. Ever since 21 August 2013, these minions have been claiming that Assad had no use for CW because he was winning without them. Six years running, longer than WWII! That has been their mantra: “he's winning without them.” But even today, even in the last holdout province of Idlib, he isn't winning, at least not easily, even with them, and very heavy Russian carpet bombing. He uses CW because it is a terror weapon par excellence, because it kills the little children first, and because it gets at those hiding in the basements from his bombs.

Terror of Russia and Assad warplanes hit #JisrAlShoghour City again..
5 civilians were killed, and 8 others injured until now, after regime warplanes attacked civilian houses in the city this morning. White Helmets search and rescue operations continue. pic.twitter.com/rHcCgvuMRC

— The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) July 11, 2019

There is another reason why Russia is feeling none too friendly towards the OPCW these days. The OPCW is questioning whether the Assad regime has been honest in declaring and giving up all of its chemical weapons. One of the simplistic counter-arguments to be heard from the “Working Group,” and other Assad apologists, is that the regime couldn't possibly be responsible for chemical weapons attacks since it gave up all its CW years ago. They never entertained the possibility that mass murderers could also be liars, but The Arab News reported Tuesday that it appears Assad hung on to a hidden stash:

Top watchdog voices concerns over Syria’s chemical weapons

THE HAGUE: Member states of the global chemical weapons watchdog voiced concern Tuesday that Syria may still possess such weapons after inspectors discovered traces of what could be a byproduct of a nerve agent or poison gas at a Syrian research facility.

In a report submitted to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Executive Council, the organization’s director-general said the traces were found late last year at Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center in Barzah. More...

Russian Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Georgy Kalamanov, claimed recently that the Assad regime couldn't be responsible for any of the recent chemical weapons attacks in Syria because it “has declared and destroyed all its chemical weapons arsenals.” So, like the Trump cabal, they are now refusing to co-operate with what they call “endless” investigations. According to the Russian News Agency TASS:

A number of Western nations have repeatedly accused Damascus of using chemical weapons, providing no evidence to support these allegations. The Syrian authorities have repeatedly denied the accusations. Russia is against additional inspections in Syria to verify the destruction of chemical weapons

Only one of the above statements is not true, which ain't bad for Tass. There has been plenty of evidence.

Director-General Fernando Arias also reported that Syria has refused to issue a visa to the coordinator of an OPCW team that aims to attribute blame for chemical weapons attacks in the country.

Many of these issues came up for discussion at 91st session of the OPCW Executive Council, which was held 9-12 July 2019 in The Hague, the Netherland. At it H.E. Sabine Nölke, Permanent Representative to the OPCW from Canada, issued an insightful statement about the current controversies whirling around the OPCW. In it he said:

Canada is deeply concerned by recent reports of the Declaration Assessment Team (DAT) that Syrian authorities have removed and destroyed equipment and munitions that the DAT had requested be preserved for further assessment. Samples of a chemical detected at Barzah were identified by two separate designated labs as a likely by-product of a Schedule 1 chemical. This adds to the growing evidence of deliberately false declarations by Syria, destruction of possible evidence, and the alarming likelihood that Syria continues to possess Schedule 1 chemicals. Continued possession of these chemicals by Syria lends additional credence to existing allegations of their use by the regime.

I'd be curious to hear the “Working Group's” apology for Assad on this question. Destruction of evidence is not the act of an innocent party.

Beyond the submission of an incomplete or untrue declaration, the Syria continues to obfuscate and present obstacles to undermine the work States Parties have instructed the OPCW to carry out. Syrian authorities have refused to issue a visa to the Coordinator of the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) to enter the country as a member of a delegation from the Technical Secretariat. This violates Article VII, paragraph 7 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which obliges each State Party to “cooperate with the Organization in the exercise of its functions and in particular to provide assistance to the Technical Secretariat”. We urge Syria to fulfill its obligations under the Convention.

The Canadian representative then goes on to speak of Ian Henderson's “Executive Summary” of a paper none have seen:

The Director General informed the States Parties on April 28th that an OPCW internal engineering report, produced as part of the work of the Fact-Finding Mission on Douma, had been leaked to actors outside the organisation. The FFM considered the report in question along with all available information it examined, weighed and deliberated on. Based on the overall facts and evidence collected and analysed, the FFM found that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that molecularchlorine was used as a weapon in Douma. Since the leaked engineering report also addressed attribution questions outside the mandate of the FFM, the DG asked that it also be transferred to the IIT for consideration in its ongoing work.

I emphasised that part because I had also reached the same conclusion, Henderson had submitted it to the wrong mission, possible because he already knew Syria would refuse to recognize the IIT.

Canada remains steadfast in its confidence in the professionalism and integrity of the FFM and its methods.However, Mr. Chair, we are unsettled with the leak of official confidential documents from the Technical Secretariat. The DG has indicated that an investigation is underway to determine how the breach occurred and to ensure that it does not happen in the future. We are all aware that there have been serious attempts to compromise the information security and confidential material held by the Technical Secretariat, including by States Parties in this room. The Organisation, its current and past staff, and States Parties are all bound by the OPCW’s Policy on Confidentiality and have a responsibility and an interest in preserving internal information. We support the DG for his management of this issue.

He probably was referring to the hacking attempt mount against the OPCW in The Hague by the Russian GRU. Was he also thinking of the “leaked” Henderson note?

In a similar vein, we are watching with concern a growing coordinated effort to undermine this organisation. We have seen efforts from a number of actors to conduct smear campaigns against individuals in the TS, circulate false information and attempt to discredit the OPCW as an institution. Canada, like most of us here, is bound by facts, evidence-based decision-making and the rule of law. We will not be distracted by efforts to draw attention away from the use of chemical weapons, or the use of non-facts and non-science to call into question the scientific evidence and investigation into these crimes. We will continue to call out disinformation where we see it, and to counter it with the facts and the truth, which underpin rules-based international order.

This is how Sabine Nölke called out Russia's war on the OPCW just a few days ago.

Recent posts on this beat:
Russian's War on the OPCW— Putting the Henderson “leak” in contex
Lies, damned lies, and engineering sub-team reports
Where in the world is Ian Henderson?
More on the silent Ian Henderson and his “leaked” OPCW paper
Dr. Ted Postol rides again - right into the OPCW “leak” controversy
OPCW Word Games - Exposing the Politics of the Henderson "leak"
Henderson's “leaked” OPCW Executive Summary: a searchable version
“Working Group” Can you find Henderson or “leak” his full OPCW report?

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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“Working Group” Can you find Henderson or “leak” his full OPCW report?

In the middle of April, a group of British academic supporters of war criminals that call themselves the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media release a 15-page PDF that claimed to be the “Executive Summary” signed by a Ian Henderson of an “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” Now more than two months have gone by and nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of Mr. Henderson, and nobody has claimed to even have seen the “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident,” that Ian Henderson's Executive Summary claims to summarize.

United States Attorney General William Barr has recently shown us how much we should trust an “Executive Summary” while we are being denied the full report.

      “shouldn't give it
      the time of day.”

No one should continue to give this so-called "Executive Summary" a minutes attention as long as the document being summarized is missing and the author is unavailable to validate his work.


The “Working Group” is obviously affected with  the chemical weapons fetish. As many as 1700 civilians were murdered by Assad's big sarin attack on East Ghouta, 21 August 2013, but the body count on other CW attacks comes nowhere close to that. While over 300 chemical attacks have been reported on Syria since 2012, only a handful have caused a hundred or more deaths. For most CW attacks, the death toll was much smaller, and many caused no deaths at all.

The point is that in a civil war in which more than a half-million civilians have been slaughtered, chemical weapons have played a small part in the killing. The Russian and Syrian air forces have done far more damage, and taken far more lives, than these chemical attacks. It is their wanton attacks on civilian targets that brand Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin as war criminals, even if they never used chemical weapons.

And yet the “Working Group” is focused almost entirely on defending the Syrian and Russian governments against charges that they have used chemical weapons, and they have yet to find even one CW attack either of these two regimes are responsible for, even though they both have documented histories of war crimes by non-chemical means. That history of conventional war crimes, and police state torture, is not of interest to the “Working Group.” They are the chemical warfare barristers for war criminals.

In their latest post promoting the Henderson “leaked” Executive Summary, they claim to have contacts inside the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that are feeding them secrets. 

 “Our sources have provided information that fills in some details of how the investigation was nobbled.”

Have your sources been able to come up with anything backing Henderson's claims beyond his “Executive Summary”?

"Our sources report that even before he took up his post as an employee of the OPCW, he was frequently in the building ...”

Well, wasn't he the French Deputy permanent representative to OPCW even before he changed jobs and became an employee of the OPCW?

Have your sources told you when Ian Henderson was last in the building, and why he has no comment, after two months, about the report that bears his name?

“We have confirmed from other sources that the Team Leader who left Damascus was Sami Barrek and that he was subsequently seen in Turkey with the White Helmets.”

Scandalous! He associates with people who save lives.

Have any of your sources spotted the illusive Mr. Henderson, or found even a few pages of the  “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” beyond the 15-page summary?

“We have learned from multiple sources that the second stage of the investigation involved consultation with Len Phillips...”

Thank you for providing the Linkedin link for Phillips. Now, could you please provide one for Henderson? Linkedin finds 1,394 Ian Hendersons, won't any of your multiple sources tell you which is your man Henderson?

Finally, you thank your sources inside the OPCW:

“We thank the OPCW staff members who continue to communicate with us, some of whom have provided detailed comments on earlier drafts of this briefing note.”

A pity one of the OPCW staff members who continue to communicate with you isn't Ian Henderson. Have they been able to give you any clue as to his whereabouts or the reason for his prolonged silence?

You say:

“A first step towards restoring belief in the integrity of the OPCW’s investigations would be to make the reports from all three external engineering consultancies publicly available.”

We also need to see more than Henderson's Executive Summary. When can we see the report he is summarizing?

You say:

“To resolve the discrepancy between the conclusions of the internal Engineering Assessment and those of the Final Report, a first step would be to make public the assessments of the external engineering experts on whom the Final Report relied." 

Actually, to resolve any discrepancy between the conclusions of the internal Engineering Assessment and those of the Final Report, we would need to see the Engineering Assessment, and not just the mysterious Mr. Henderson's “Executive Summary” of the Engineering Assessment. So, we are all awaiting the leaking of the “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” - so far we have only seen the “Executive Summary”

When will we see “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident”?

Where is Ian Henderson?

Recent posts on this beat:

Russian's War on the OPCW— Putting the Henderson "leak" in contex
Lies, damned lies, and engineering sub-team reports
Where in the world is Ian Henderson?
More on the silent Ian Henderson and his "leaked" OPCW paper
Dr. Ted Postol rides again - right into the OPCW "leak" controversy
OPCW Word Games - Exposing the Politics of the Henderson "leak"
Henderson's "leaked" OPCW Executive Summary: a searchable version

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for our posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of our other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of our other blogs on Libya