Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

Russia Increasing Destruction Capabilities

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Russia to step up combat capabilities in Crimea   (Reuters) – Russia‘s top general said on Tuesday he would beef up combat capabilities this year in Crimea, the Arctic and the country’s westernmost Kaliningrad region that borders two NATO states.

The remarks by General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, are likely to deepen concern in the West over what it sees as Russia increasingly flexing its muscles since the start of the crisis in Ukraine.

NATO’s top military commander, General Philip Breedlove, said the alliance was already looking at stepping up exercises in the Baltic Sea region in response to a rise in Russian military manoeuvres there late last year.

“In 2015, the Defence Ministry will focus its efforts on increasing the combat capabilities of its units and increasing combat strength in accordance with the military development plans,” Gerasimov told Russian journalists.

“Special attention will be given to the groups in Crimea, the Kaliningrad region and the Arctic,” he was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies but gave no further details.

His remarks follow the adoption of a new military doctrine signed by President Vladimir Putin in December which underlines the need to protect Russia’s interests in the Arctic and identifies NATO expansion as an external risk.

Any military build-up on NATO’s doorstep in Kaliningrad, an exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania, would worry the Western alliance, while the Arctic’s mineral riches and energy reserves ensure that territory there is contested by several nations.

Russia deployed 14 military jets to Crimea last November as part of a squadron of 30 that will be stationed there, making clear it intends to strengthen its presence on the peninsula since annexing it from Kiev last March.

Breedlove warned at the time that Russia’s “militarization” of Crimea could be used to exert control over the Black Sea.

He said on Tuesday NATO was considering adapting a programme of military exercises in the Baltic Sea region, where he said Russian activities had changed in character and showed capabilities not seen before.

“The first series of changes will not be an increase in number but they will be to group them together … to better prepare our forces and to allow nations to work together as a NATO force, but we are looking at increasing some exercises,” he said at a NATO base at Szczecin in northwest Poland.

NATO has boosted its military presence in eastern Europe, saying it has evidence Russia orchestrated and armed the rebellion in eastern Ukraine last year that followed the overthrow of a Kremlin-backed president in Kiev.

Putin says Russia poses no threat to anyone and denies Russia has sent troops or weapons to back the separatists. ***   Beyond the usual sources of influence in Ukraine, George Soros continues to take an active role. Yet it gets much worse as civilians have died in shelling operations.

Pro-Russian separatists unleashed a series of bomb attacks Tuesday in eastern Ukraine, leveling a key airport in Donetsk, killing 12 in an attack on a passenger bus and almost certainly dooming a short-lived cease-fire, according to reports.

A senior State Department official confirmed to Fox News that the separatists destroyed the government-held airport in eastern Ukraine Tuesday afternoon.

The facility has been “flattened” and the air control tower was “decimated,” the official said. “They are now fighting over rubble.”

Maria Ivanovna, a local retiree, told The Associated Press she has become desensitized to the blasts and drew an arc with her arm to show how shells fly over her home toward the airport.

“We will survive the same way we did after World War II. Ration cards for bread; 11 ounces for children; 800 grams for factory workers and 1,200 grams for miners,” she said.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Tuesday the bus attack was “egregious” and blamed Russia for helping to arm the separatists.

“We again call on Russia to fulfill its commitment under the Minsk Agreement, which includes ceasing its substantial military support to the separatists, restoring Ukrainian sovereignty over the international border between Ukraine and Russia, releasing all hostages, and working toward the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine,” Harf said.

Across Donetsk, the city that Russian-backed separatists call their capital, explosions and the sound of shells whistling overhead are again unnerving the local population. The holiday period was spent in relative tranquility after a new truce was called in December between government troops and Russian-backed militia. But by late last week, that uneasy calm was steadily unraveling.

In the single largest loss of life so far this year, civilians traveling on a commuter bus from Donetsk were killed Tuesday afternoon by what Ukrainians say were rockets fired from a Grad launcher in rebel territory. Regional authorities loyal to Kiev said the bus was passing a Ukrainian Army checkpoint at the time, putting it in the line of fire.

Leading rebel representative Denis Pushilin denied responsibility for the attack.

The warring sides are now trading accusations over who is responsible for the breakdown in the truce that led to Tuesday’s deaths.

Military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said that separatist attacks in recent days suggest an attempted onslaught to push back the frontline is under way. Separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko says Ukraine’s armed forces unilaterally resumed hostilities and that his fighters would respond in kind.

An AP reporter over the weekend saw a convoy of around 30 military-style trucks without license plates heading for Donetsk, suggesting that new supplies were coming in for the rebels.

NATO’s top commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, said Tuesday that there has been a continued resupply and training of rebel forces over the holiday period.

“Those continue to provide a concern and something that we have to be thinking about,” Breedlove said.

Ukraine and the West have routinely accused Russia of being behind such consignments. Moscow flatly rejects the charges, although rebel forces are so well-equipped with powerful arms that the denials have become increasingly hollow.

In the rebel-held Donetsk suburb of Makiivka, the thrash of outgoing mortars shakes still-inhabited neighborhoods on a daily basis. Separatists have consistently denied using residential areas for cover, but there are ample witness accounts undermining those claims.

Ukrainian responses to artillery lobbed out of Donetsk are woefully inaccurate and regularly hit houses and apartment blocks, often killing people inside. The separatist military headquarters in Donetsk said Tuesday that 12 people had been killed and another 30 injured in the preceding three-day period. It did not specify who had been killed.

There is little sign of life in Makiivka these days. People rush home from work or aid distribution points and occasionally come out of shelters to exchange information about where shells are landing.

A senior U.N. human rights official said this week that developments look poised to go in one of three directions — a frozen conflict, an escalation in violence or an evolution to sustainable peace.

“In case of frozen conflict, we will more or less continue to be seeing [the same] human rights violations that we have been facing so far,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “But in case of escalation of hostilities, which is quite possible, we could also be seeing further internationalization of the conflict and far more human rights violations and suffering.”

The grimmest of outcomes appears most likely.

A hoped-for round of peace negotiations this week between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France has been put on ice — possibly indefinitely.

Ukrainian military authorities talk like they are bracing for the long-haul and Tuesday laid out plans for a new round of mobilization.

Volodymyr Talalai, deputy head of the army’s mobilization planning, said recruits will be drawn from all regions of the country. He gave no figure for how many people will be mobilized, but said that the primary aim of the upcoming drive is to enable the rotation of forces.

Unremitting violence is radicalizing the mood. One resident of Donetsk’s Petrovsky neighborhood — one of the most intensely bombed — said she took up arms and joined the separatist army after a rocket hit a home in her neighborhood.

“A Grad landed … and people were killed and blown to bits,” she said, giving her name only as Vera. “How were we supposed to react? We are out here defending ourselves.”

Wearing a balaclava and cradling an automatic rifle, Vera said her 19-year-old son too wanted to sign up, but that she refused to let him.

“I told them I would rather go myself than let my child do it,” she said.

 

 

Due to Haiti, No White House Run for Hillary

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There are countless reasons to keep the Clintons out of the White House in 2017. Many of them are obvious including sex scandals, Benghazi, Travelgate and Hillary’s most recent declaration that we must come to understand the reasons that militant Islamists have for killing, in short be sensitive to their condition. Yeah sure. But let’s take a look at a matter ignored for many years and that is Haiti.

Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project

Caracol Industrial Park is failing to deliver on the promises made to foreign investors and Haitians.

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.

Successful industrial parks are built by people who know the business and who demand accountability. This park was put in the hands of State, the IDB and Bill Clinton. The results have been predictable.

I had been warned about Caracol going to the dogs by sources on the ground in Haiti. So last month I traveled east by truck from Cap Haitien, across the poor rural north of the country to see if the alarm was justified. I found a project in trouble. It can be saved, but only if it is handed over to professionals with skin in the game.

On paper Caracol makes sense. Thanks to special trade legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in Dec. 2006, Haitian-sewn apparel enters the U.S. duty free and the manufacturers can use fabric purchased from anywhere in the world. This gives Haiti a big advantage over apparel exporters to the U.S. who have to source the fabric in the U.S. even if they sew overseas. With lower wages than in many Asian markets and proximity to North America, Haitian-based producers have comparative advantages that might offset the country’s low productivity.

The State Department initially promised that the park would be able to support 65,000 direct jobs by 2020. The Clinton Foundation has made similar statements. That means constructing 40 10,000 square-meter buildings for garment assembly. It won’t happen at the current pace.

The total job-creating capacity since the foundation stone was laid in November 2011 is three assembly buildings and a 10-megawatt power plant. A fourth workshop is under construction but is unlikely to be completed before late spring.

This must be tough to take for the anchor tenant, the Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Ltd. It has committed to a $78 million investment at Caracol and currently employs some 4,500 Haitians. It says it wants to hire 20,000. To do so it needs another dozen buildings.

A Dec. 12 IDB press release says the Haitian government is approved for a new $70 million grant to construct, among other things, three new production buildings by 2018 with a goal of providing space for 6,800 workers. Bank officials have to know that putting Haitian government officials in charge of such a project is likely to doom it. But let’s suppose I’m wrong and the buildings go up. The Caracol workforce will then be 11,300—a far cry from the State Department’s estimate of 65,000 direct jobs or even the IBD’s forecast of 40,000.

It’s understandable for the IDB to want to lower expectations. But the target should be higher and it shouldn’t take three years to boost capacity. Craig Miller, president of the Boston-based Waterfield Design Group and a consultant for the Haitian apparel sector, told me that “once the materials are on site, a 10,000 square-meter production workshop can be built in six to eight months.”

Apparel manufacturers in Haiti are hungry for production space but my sources say investors were not given an option to build their own workshops in Caracol. The Clinton planners—Hillary at State and Bill at the Clinton Foundation—wanted to retain that responsibility for reasons that can only be guessed. So now the producers have to wait.

This is tragic for the thousands of Haitians eager to get the sewing jobs. Factory workers earn three times the average income in Haiti’s north. Sae-A produces for a wide number of American labels, such as Target and Wal-Mart, WMT +0.48% Wal-Mart Stores Inc. U.S.: NYSE $89.78 +0.43+0.48% Jan 12, 2015 11:44 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.72M P/E Ratio 18.32 Market Cap $287.99 Billion Dividend Yield 2.14% Rev. per Employee $219,905 01/09/15 Toys “R” Us Holiday Period Sam… 01/08/15 Tesco to Cut Prices, Close Unp… 01/08/15 Stocks to Watch: Family Dollar… More quote details and news » WMT in Your Value Your Change Short position and the American companies regularly dispatch auditors to inspect work conditions. Even without the U.S. Labor Department breathing down its back, Sae-A has incentives to care for workers to retain them and boost productivity. Getting a spot on the assembly line opens the door to economic mobility, and that’s unusual in Haiti.

Haiti has a rare opportunity. Investors want to invest, workers want to work, and consumers want to buy. This seems like a good time for government to get out of the way.

But how did all this begin? 

Bill Clinton’s Shameful Haiti Legacy

He may be playing the hero now, but the ex-president’s trip to Haiti is a reminder of the mess his administration left behind. Bob Shacochis on how Clinton wasted a good invasion.
Like many Haitians and not a few Americans who know the island and its history, I had mixed feelings watching the video of former President Clinton step off a plane on to the tarmac at Toussaint Loverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince on Monday afternoon. Bill Clinton, the Second Coming of Hope. The First Coming, the U.S.-led invasion in 1994 adorned with 20,000 American troops, did not turn out so well. By 1996, when the American military decamped, you’d be hard pressed to find a Haitian on the streets of Port-au-Prince who wasn’t suffering miserably from hope. By 1996, Haitians were scratching their heads in bewilderment, asking themselves Why has America come to save us? Who will save us now? Ten years later, by almost every measure, Haiti was worse off than it was before Clinton had “rescued” it from the illegitimate regime of General Raoul Cedras and his gang of terrorist enforcers, known by the acronym FRAPH.

I had heard the Haitians saying of the U.S. after the American troops went home: “Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.”

It’s the proper time, of course, to ask what is the legacy of American foreign policy in Haiti, a beleaguered neighbor that we have invaded and occupied twice in the 20th century, the first time to preempt German influence there during and after World War I, the second time during the early years of the Clinton administration, an 18-month long intervention which I reported on for Harper’s magazine.  

Looking at the images pouring out of Haiti these days, what comes immediately into focus is the near-sighted, irrational nature of what is out of focus in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan worked its miracles on a shattered planet. I think that we can all agree that Haiti has finally found its bottom, but the descent, lubricated by man-made folly, was not inevitable.

To be sure, Haiti brings out the cynic in me. Perhaps I should express that sentiment with more precision: The United States’ two-faced relationship with Haiti stirs a cynicism within me that I’d rather not claim.

The U.S. Army came ashore in September 1994 locked and loaded to do battle with a military dictatorship composed of a tiny dysfunctional army and roving bands of FRAPH’s homicidal thugs, who threatened to send America’s sons and daughters back home in coffins. Essentially an absurd boast but from a genuine enemy. Colin Powell’s brinkmanship defused the potential for bloodshed on the eve of the invasion, yet the fact remained—our soldiers would be liberating villages, towns, and cities controlled by a terrorist organization that had brutalized the population.

Early on, there were shootouts between U.S. soldiers and FRAPH. Special Forces hunted down FRAPH leadership in the countryside, captured them and shipped the detainees to headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where, to general dismay, they were invariably released. One night, hunkered down with a detachment of Green Berets in the mountains south of Cap Haitien, I listened in alarm to a radio transmission from Col. Mark Boyatt, the overall commander of Special Forces in Haiti, telling his commandos to begin regarding FRAPH as Haiti’s “loyal opposition,” as if the terrorists, overnight, had become Haiti’s equivalent to the Republican Party, rehabilitated patriots eager to remake Haiti into a modern democratic nation.

Months later, when I challenged Colonel Boyatt on this highly counterproductive order to his troops, he clammed up on me. For the next two years, I tried to track down who in the chain of command had told Boyatt to whitewash the terrorist organization FRAPH. The trail finally led to the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, and then it jumped to the mainland, Sandy Berger, and the White House.

Legacy No. 1: We left the poison in the system. The result: A Haiti rendered ungovernable by our heedless self-interest. The only Devil in Haiti is to be found in the deals we cut with the worst elements in that society. Sound familiar?

On March 31, 1996, the United States handed over Operation Restore Democracy to the United Nations and a peacekeeping force that has been there ever since. Early in the Clinton administration’s intervention in Haiti, the word came down to the boots on the ground from the White House: You have not been deployed to conduct nation-building. The mission turned out to be foolishly attenuated: Restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to the National Palace. Hold elections that will remove the troublesome Aristide from the National Palace. Go home.

Ultimately, the mission ended up profoundly disillusioning not only the Haitians but the American troops as well. Back at Fort Bragg, I asked a Special Forces Master Sergeant if he was glad he went to Haiti. “Tough question,” he said. “No carpenter likes to build a house and see it crooked and leaning and ready to fall down the day he leaves. But if he builds a nice house, he’s happy about it, it’s something he’ll be proud of the rest of his life.”

“You don’t think you have anything to be proud of?” I asked.

“No.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“It is,” said the Master Sergeant. “It is.”

I told him what I had heard the Haitians saying about the United States after the American troops went home. Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.

Legacy No. 2: In Haiti, America wasted a perfectly good occupation. Call our post-earthquake presence there anything you want, but let’s hope it works out better this time around. Good luck, Bill. And remember, merry are the builders.

Bob Shacochis, a professor at Florida State University, is the author of The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 U.S. intervention in Haiti.

 

 

 

French Government Does NOT Get a Pass

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The world watched in horror the bloody events in Paris at the hands of militants. A great deal of work is going into investigations and research to determine names, backgrounds, connections and causes of the terror in France.

The background, cells and names rising to the surface are not new to the intelligence communities allied with the United States. What is new is that the governmental leadership(s) in Europe, North Africa and the West ignored the intelligence clarion calls for alarm.

Going back to 2005 and even earlier, mining open source information, the Buttes Chaumont information has been out there. The brothers of the Paris attacks were only the most recent members of the Buttes Chaumont terror cell. There were clearly other brothers and members that were festering a decade ago.

 

‘The first cell in this network was named the “19th arrondissement” or “Buttes Chaumont” cell, which both brothers were a part of. Farid Benyettou, a charismatic self-taught preacher who lectured outside various mosques and prayer groups, including the Addawa mosque of the 19th arrondissement, led this cell. Although Redouane died, Boubaker was in charge of a way station in Syria for French youths headed to Iraq. El-Hakim did not last long, though, since the Assad regime arrested him in 2004, imprisoned him for a year, and then extradited him to France in 2005.
El-Hakim would be sentenced in 2008 to seven years for his involvement in the recruitment ring. This would have kept him imprisoned through 2015, but he ended up only serving 2/3 of his term and was then deported to Tunisia sometime in 2012. Since then, el-Hakim’s name has popped up in reports on militants around Chaambi Mountain in western Tunisia. Again, it is hard to assess these claims since there is almost no way of independently verifying them. That said, due to his past connections within a jihadi recruitment network and al-Qaeda in Iraq, it would not be far-fetched if he indeed did have some type of connection or relationship with AQIM.
At the same time, due to the murky nature of el-Hakim’s presence in Tunisia and the dearth of solid information on the connections between AQIM and AST, it is too early to come to any real conclusions.’

The New York Times is data mining as well as has offered some current insight but the paper omits the feeble policy by the French leadership to deal with the dark yet active cell connections in France and in Northern Africa. The intelligence IS there but quite possibly passed to the side out of lack of law enforcement, lack of policy and lack of will.

It is a tragedy that France had to deploy more that 85,000 personnel to track down the killers in France while some many victims died. For the next several weeks, collaboration on intelligence and policy will occur include the United States.

PARIS — They jogged together or did calisthenics along the hilly lawns and tulip-dotted gardens of Buttes-Chaumont, the public park in northeastern Paris built more than a century ago under Emperor Napoleon III. Or they met in nearby apartments with a janitor turned self-proclaimed imam, a man deemed too radical by one local mosque because of his call for waging jihad in Iraq.

The group of young Muslim men, some still teenagers, became known to the French authorities as the Buttes-Chaumont group after the police in 2005 broke up their pipeline for sending young French Muslims from their immigrant neighborhood to fight against American troops in Iraq. The arrests seemingly shattered the group, and some officials and experts were skeptical that members ever posed a threat to France.

But the shocking terror attacks last week in Paris have now made plain that the Buttes-Chaumont network produced some of Europe’s most militant jihadists, including Chérif Kouachi, one of the three terrorists whose three-day rampage left 17 people dead and who was killed by the police.

Other alumni from the group have died in Iraq or remained committed to radical Islam, including a French-Tunisian now aligned with the Islamic State who has claimed responsibility for a handful of assassinations in Tunisia, including the July 2013 murder of a leading left-wing politician.

“They were considered the least dangerous,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies and specialist on French Islamic terror cells, said of the Buttes-Chaumont group. “And now you see them really at the forefront.”

Now French authorities, while still piecing together how such violent attacks could have been staged in the capital, must also be concerned by the possibility that other homegrown groups may be passing unnoticed — or may be similarly underestimated.

The attacks suggest the prospect of a potent intermingling among some members of the original Buttes-Chaumont group and other extremists. Their meeting place, apparently, was the French prison system.

There, their radicalism hardened as some members of the group came together with other prominent jihadists who were connected to more extensive and dangerous militant networks.

For decades, France has endured Islamic terror threats and attacks, from Iranian-inspired groups during the 1980s, to Algerian extremists in the 1990s, to cells linked to Al Qaeda before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

More recently, French and other European security services have grown increasingly alarmed by thousands of young, alienated Muslim citizens who have enlisted for jihad in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

In each decade, a familiar pattern has emerged: a radicalized minority of European Muslims — whether they have gone abroad for jihad or not — have been angered and inspired by wars the West has waged in the Arab world, Africa and beyond, and have sought to bring the costs of those conflicts home.

After French authorities swept up members of the Buttes-Chaumont group in the 2005, during his time in prison Chérif Kouachi came under the sway of an influential French-Algerian jihadist who had plotted to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris in 2001.

There, he also recruited a holdup artist named Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday.

It is unclear if his older brother, Saïd Kouachi, who also took part in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office, was a member of the Buttes-Chaumont group, but the authorities have confirmed that the older brother spent time in Yemen between 2009 and 2012, getting training from a branch of Al Qaeda.

 

Threat to NATO via Russian Aggression

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Poland to Seek NATO Response to Russia’s Military Exercises

(Reuters) – Poland expects the NATO alliance to step up its military exercises around the Baltic Sea after a flurry of activity by Russian warships and jet fighters in the area last month, Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told Reuters in an interview.

Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, Oct. 14, 2014

“What happened in December was indeed rather unprecedented,” Siemoniak said. “We will definitely want the Baltic Sea to be taken into account to a greater extent, and I think that in terms of military exercises planned by NATO, there will be such a reaction,” he said. The interview was conducted on Monday but authorised for release by the ministry on Thursday.

The Atlantic alliance has already increased the frequency of air patrols in the region, part of a revival of Cold War tensions sparked by Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its support for Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebels.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits anti-submarine ship Vice Admiral Kulakov, Sept. 23, 2014

Siemoniak said Moscow did not have an exit strategy, and that NATO and the European Union, which has imposed sanctions on Russia together with the United States, should brace themselves for years of conflict.

“We shouldn’t talk about lifting the sanctions too soon,” he said, adding that they were the most effective tool at the West’s disposal.

The French government in November put on hold a contract to supply Mistral warships to Russia after coming under pressure from NATO allies.

Asked if French-based companies such as Airbus and the Thales could suffer as they bid for contracts in Poland’s $41 billion army modernisation programme, Siemoniak said: “I’m counting on France‘s decision (not to deliver) being permanent, so the problem has been solved. It seems that Russia has also accepted that.”

Siemoniak also denied that a U.S. Senate report, which in December made clear by implication that Poland had allowed the CIA to run secret detention facilities on its soil, had damaged the relationship between the two allies.

Polish officials have expressed disappointment that the published version of the report contained enough detail to implicate Poland, putting it at risk of reprisal attacks.

“I think that, at the moment, the cooperation between our intelligence agencies is the best in history,” Siemoniak said, “so the publication of the report has not made it more difficult.”

Meanwhile Back in Syria, Destruction

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Extremists destroy 13th century Muslim tomb in Syria

Nusra Front Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda have blown up the 13th century tomb of a revered Islamic scholar in southern Syria, Syrian state news agency SANA and monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported.

The mausoleum of Imam Nawawi is in Nawa in Deraa province near the Jordanian border, a town captured by groups fighting the Syrian government in November.

The Nusra Front follows the same puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam adopted by the Islamic State group that has also destroyed shrines in areas of eastern and northern Syria that it controls. They see tombs as sacrilegious.

Investigators confident that chlorine gas was used in 3 Syrian villages

UNITED NATIONS — Chemical weapons investigators concluded “with a high degree of confidence” that chlorine gas was used as a weapon against three opposition-controlled villages in Syria last year, affecting between 350 and 500 people and killing 13, according to a report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The third report by a fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons didn’t apportion blame but said 32 of 37 people interviewed “saw or heard the sound of a helicopter over the village at the time of the attack with barrel bombs containing toxic chemicals.”

The investigators said 26 people heard the distinctive “whistling” sound of the falling barrel bombs containing toxic chemicals and 16 visited the impact sites and saw the bombs or their remnants. They said 29 people smelled “the distinctive odor of the gas cloud” released after the bombs hit the ground, mainly describing it “as intense, chlorine-like, similar to cleaning material used to clean toilets, but much stronger.”

The report includes a description of 142 videos and 189 pieces of material obtained by the investigators as well as photos of impact sites and the inner chlorine cylinder from a barrel bomb.

The mission was established by the OPCW on April 29 to establish the facts surrounding allegations of the use of chlorine “for hostile purposes” in Syria. Chlorine gas is readily available and is used in industry around the world, but it can also be used as a weapon.

The U.N. Security Council has been intensely involved in the issue of alleged chemical weapons use in Syria. After an August 2013 sarin gas attack near Damascus in which the U.S. says more than 1,400 people were killed, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution backed by the U.S. and Russia on Sept. 27, 2013, ordering Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile to be destroyed. U.N. investigators could not find enough evidence to assess blame for the sarin attack. Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles have since been destroyed under international supervision, but questions remain about whether it may still be hiding deadly chemical agents.

Chlorine gas is not listed as a chemical weapon. But eight council members, including the United States, said in a Dec. 30 letter accompanying the OPCW report that the 2013 resolution also states that any use of chemical weapons threatens international peace and security and must be condemned.

The 15 council members discussed the fact-finding mission’s report behind closed doors Tuesday, and diplomats said the U.S. and other Western nations who signed the letter along with Jordan urged Security Council action in response to the findings. But Russia, Syria’s closest ally, insisted that the report on chlorine attacks was an issue for the OPCW, which polices the Chemical Weapons Convention, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because consultations were private.

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mekdad told an OPCW meeting on Dec. 1 that his government has never used chemical weapons or chlorine gas during the country’s four-year civil war, which has claimed over 200,000 lives and displaced one third of the country’s population. He said terror groups “have used chlorine gas in several of the regions of Syria and Iraq.”

But U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted that “only Syrian regime uses (helicopters).” She also tweeted that the Syrian “Regime must be shown it is not enough to destroy declared CW (chemical weapons); must stop dropping chemical-laden explosives on civilians.”

The investigators interviewed 14 people from the village of Talmenes in Idlib governorate about barrel bomb attacks on April 21 and April 24. At two houses that were hit, a 7-year-old boy, a teenage girl, and the matriarch of a family died from exposure to chlorine gas, they said. Domestic animals including cows, goats and sheep also died at both houses.

Fourteen people from the village of Al Tamanah, also in Idlib, were interviewed by the mission’s investigators about five incidents in April and May – all but one at night. Eight members of two families who had sought refuge in the village died shortly after separate attacks involving the toxic chemical, the report said.

Investigators said they interviewed nine people from Kafr Zita in Hama Governorate in northern Syria and were told that the village had been the target of hundreds of attacks with conventional weapons and 17 attacks using toxic chemicals between April and August.