The news from Syria this week has been horrific. In the north-west Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, a chemical weapons attack killed more than 70 people, including 20 children. This attack confirms a simple and frightening reality: as this conflict continues, the nature of the fighting will become more deadly. But there is another debate that this attack has once again brought to the forefront of the international conversation regarding Syria: the future of Bashar Al Assad.
Unless and until there is an admission of guilt, we cannot be 100 per cent certain who was responsible for this appalling attack, which has been rightly condemned as a war crime. The finger of blame, however, points in one direction. In Syria, only the Assad regime possesses both chemical weapons and the means to deliver them, and there can be little doubt that the Syrian president has once again shown he has little compunction in killing his own people to cling on to power. A claim by Russia that the deadly nerve gas came from a rebel weapons cache hit by a Syrian air strike has been comprehensively debunked by chemical weapons experts, who point out that a nerve agent such sarin, when hit by a bomb, would be destroyed rather than spread. The suggestion by Assad supporters that the rebels themselves carried out the attack to provoke western intervention against the regime belongs in the farthest reaches of the conspiracy theory universe.
That leaves Mr Al Assad, and an apparently intractable problem. For the past few months, the mood music surrounding Syria has been one of realpolitik: as recently as this week, the White House was saying that Mr Al Assad’s presence as Syria’s head of state was a political reality that would have to be worked with. After Tuesday’s attack, the Trump administration blamed Barack Obama’s “weakness” in failing to deal with the threat of the regime’s chemical weapons. However, at the time of Mr Obama’s “red line” ultimatum in August 2012, Donald Trump argued vociferously against any US involvement in Syria. Now that he is president, the question arises of how he proposes to project strength.
Russian support for the Assad regime leaves the UN Security Council hamstrung, but one thing is certain: the international community, if those words are to have any meaning, cannot watch a head of state subject his own people to the agony of death by chemical weapons, and simply do nothing.
