Syria Support Movement solidarity with the Syrian people
The following document is an assessment produced by the engineering sub-team of the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) Fact-Finding Mission charged with investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.
Previously, this engineering report was excluded from the published OPCW final report of the fact-finding mission. A 15-page Executive Summary of the engineering assessment was exposed by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media in May 2019.
The 15-page summary is available for download below.
The April 2018 incident took place shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he intended to remove U.S. troops from Syria. Following the alleged chemical attack in Douma, the U.S., Britain and France attacked Syria with cruise missiles.
Since the time of the incident, numerous credible reports and investigations have noted not only that it was not logical or strategic for the Syrian government to carry out a chemical attack on a target with little to no military value at a time when it was making vast advances in liberating territory, but also that the scenario presented was dubious in many other ways. For example, the appearance of the alleged gas cylinders present at the scene did not appear to be consistent with the other photos presented of impact from artillery of some kind.
The engineering assessment below addresses these issues, among others. The OPCW confirmed that the leaked document is genuine. The report concludes that the conditions of the cylinders and the surrounding scenes were inconsistent with being dropped from an aircraft, including a helicopter, and that the “alternative hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.” The alternative hypothesis referred to here is that the cylinders were instead manually placed in the locations where they were later photographed.
Read the full leaked document below or download here:
