PARIS – Chemical munitions experts have been compiling information for years that the Syrian government has used these prohibited weapons against its own people, a war crime that has so far not been punished and has been scornfully rejected by President Bashar al-Assad.
Now, the first criminal investigations directed at al-Assad and his associates on the use of chemical weapons may begin soon.
In an important step to hold Mr. al-Assad and his circle responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed in the decade-long conflict in Syria, the judges of a special war crimes unit in France’s courthouse have received a complaint about attacks chemical weapons in Syria, powered by three international human rights groups.
The complaint, which lawyers said the judges were likely to accept, requires a criminal investigation of al-Assad, his brother, Maher, and a litany of military advisers and officers who formed the chain of command.
Along with a similar complaint filed in Germany last October, the French complaint, filed on Monday and made public on Tuesday, opens a new front in order to ensure that some form of justice for chemical weapons crimes is applied al-Assad and its hierarchy.
At the very least, criminal investigations in France and Germany can enormously complicate the future of al-Assad, who emerged largely victorious in the war in Syria, but with an outcast status that blocked the international aid needed to rebuild his country.
Obtaining such aid may become even more difficult if al-Assad and his upper echelons are defendants in war crimes proceedings in European courts, even if they consider such procedures illegitimate. Even millions of Syrians who have fled to Europe and other places as refugees are unlikely to return home.
Steve Kostas, the senior lawyer for the group that filed the complaints in France, said the focus is on the August 2013 events in the city of Douma and in the Eastern Ghouta region, near Damascus, coordinated attacks that the United States government said which killed more than 1,400 people, making them the most deadly use of chemical weapons in the world in this century.
The victims of these attacks, who inhaled the nervous agent sarin or chlorine smoke from bombs, are only a small proportion of the nearly 400,000 people killed since the start of the war in Syria in March 2011.
More than 300 chemical weapon attacks in Syria have been documented by experts, including photos and videos of adults and children seized by seizures, short of breath and often suffocating.
Many of these images were released and shocked the world. So far, no one has had to answer for them.
“We want the French to conduct an independent investigation and ultimately issue arrest warrants for those responsible for these crimes against civilians,” said Kostas, a senior lawyer at the London-based Open Society Justice Initiative.
“We know that high-ranking perpetrators will not be arrested soon,” he said. But the cases must be built now, he said, to secure prosecutions in the future.
The other two participating groups are the Syrian Archive, a documentation center in Berlin, and the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, based in Paris.
Among the witnesses they can bring, they say, are not only survivors of the attacks, but also former members of the government who are linked to the banned chemical weapons arsenal or are aware of its operation.
The request comes amid speculation about movements in some countries to seek closer ties with Damascus, an informal acknowledgment that al-Assad has not been defeated. There was also talk of planning a reconstruction phase, which would yield important contracts and facilitate the return of refugees.
But Western countries, even those that have received a significant number of refugees, are convinced that impunity for crimes is not an option for any future peace or normalization agreement. So far, only limited measures have been taken to hold senior Syrians accountable.
Russia and China blocked the way to the International Criminal Court for any atrocity proceedings in Syria, using their veto at the United Nations Security Council, which could grant jurisdiction to the ICC.
“After 10 years and all these crimes, there is no reaction from the international community, so the victims themselves are trying to knock on all doors,” said Mazen Darwish, a Syrian activist and former prisoner who founded the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.
“People die every day,” he said.
In the absence of any international court with jurisdiction over Syrian crimes, a patchwork of accountability efforts has been underway for some time. Several countries, including Germany, Sweden and France, are prosecuting or have already condemned individuals found among Europe’s many Syrian refugees.
Most of them were low-level members of the Islamic State or Syrian security forces, accused of human rights violations.
But the complaint lodged in Paris, and a similar one lodged by the same group in Germany, is aiming for the first time at the top level of the Syrian government on the issue of chemical weapons – both for previous attacks and for what the denunciations call a secret program that flagrantly disregards international law.
The group’s complaint in Germany was filed in October with the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe. The focus is on the attack by the nervous agent sarin in Eastern Ghouta in 2013 and the village controlled by the Khan Sheikhoun rebels in 2017.
Both France and Germany accept a form of universal jurisdiction, which gives their national courts the power to prosecute individuals accused of heinous crimes committed anywhere.
Kostas said French law on corporate liability could also provide the justification for presenting evidence about companies that supplied Syria with chemicals and equipment for its banned chemical weapons arsenal.
The United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons conducted investigations after the 2013 attack in Syria, but the evidence they gathered never led to any accountability and never identified the perpetrators by name.
The criminal investigation request is based in part on a two-year study of Syria’s chemical weapons program that goes beyond what other international investigations have done, Kostas said. The study relied on a multitude of sources, he said, including deserters, ex-insiders, employees, engineers and people directly or with knowledge of the program.
Gregory Koblentz, a chemical and biological weapons expert and professor at George Mason University who reviewed the study, said that while there was a lot of open source material, “it brings to light new information from defectors and insiders.”
Koblentz called it “the most comprehensive and detailed account of the Syrian weapons program available, perhaps outside intelligence services. It maps out new details in the chain of command and shows how big and complex this program was. And you can name names. “
The complaint filed in Paris also makes extensive use of the Syrian Archives, which has stored more than 3 million videos uploaded by Syrian activists. It is also based on data from the Global Public Policy Institute, a research group in Berlin.
Tobias Schneider, a researcher at the institute, said he had seen 349 attacks in the past decade, “significantly more than is known”. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, on the other hand, studied only 39 attacks because of what the organization described as limited resources.
Dazen, who spent three years in prison in Syria and now lives in Paris, said the fight against chemical weapons is more than just attacks in his country.
“If they are not banned, nowhere will be safe,” he said. “What’s next? They could be used on the Champs-Élysées.”