Syria chemical warfare claims aim to provoke Western intervention
The unsubstantiated charges that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking Western intervention.
Reports of the attack were made by Western-backed opponents of the Assad regime early Wednesday, just as a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team, admitted to Syria by the government just 72 hours earlier, began its work.
Indeed, according to the opposition sources reporting the chemical weapons attacks, they took place in Eastern Ghouta in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, just a few miles from where the UN inspection team is headquartered.
Initial contradictory reports of the alleged attack put the number of victims at as few as 20 and as many as 1,300.
Why the Assad regime should choose such a moment to launch large-scale chemical attacks—under the noses of the UN inspectors—and what motive he would have for doing so, under conditions in which his military has been inflicting a series of defeats on the US-backed “rebels,” has not been explained in any of the extensive media coverage of these unverified allegations.
Nonetheless, the US and its NATO allies, the principal supporters of the bloody war for regime change in Syria, lost no time in issuing condemnations and demanding an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, which convened behind closed doors in New York Wednesday afternoon.