Russia recently used a series of Security Council vetoes – the final one last week – to kill an international body investigating a gruesome series of chemical attacks in Syria.
The move came not long after the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), a body launched in 2015 by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), accused President Bashar al-Assad’s Moscow-backed government of using sarin, a banned nerve gas, in an April attack that reportedly killed dozens in the city of Khan Sheikhoun.
Russia’s actions have enraged al-Assad’s Western critics, who accuse the Syrian leader of secretly stockpiling chemical weapons in contravention of UN resolutions, and who now want to deliver accountability by other means.
But that will be no easy task. Opposition sources already report that civilians were exposed to chemicals in the last few days in besieged eastern Ghouta. If another major chemical attack were to take place in the absence of a broadly accepted investigatory mechanism, more than one foreign actor may be tempted to take unilateral action.
How did we get here?
The now-defunct JIM is just the latest incarnation of protracted and tortuous efforts to probe the use of banned weapons in Syria since the war there began in 2011.
In 2013, a US-Russia agreement allowed the OPCW, the 192-nation implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention, to verify Syria’s compliance with that treaty, including a promise by al-Assad to surrender all chemical weapons.
But investigators never really trusted al-Assad to live up to his side of the deal, and various other probes (see the timeline below for details) have been unable to assign blame for chemical attacks, until an August 2015 unanimous Security Council resolution created the JIM to do just that. However, when the JIM concluded that the Syrian government had indeed used chlorine gas on three occasions, a Russian and Chinese veto prevented the Security Council from acting.
The latest crisis was set off after the widely publicised sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017. The US blamed al-Assad’s government for releasing the nerve agent and responded, without waiting for a JIM verdict, with a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base. As it had with previous incidents, Damascus dismissed Khan Sheikhoun as a false flag attack. Russia and Iran also insisted that al-Assad was innocent, though they couldn’t agree on a single narrative of what had actually happened.
In June, an OPCW fact-finding mission report determined that the nerve agent sarin had indeed been used in Khan Sheikhoun, and in October, the JIM concluded that it had been released by a Syrian government jet