Sputnik News has broken a story indicating that the Russian and Syrian claim of no chemical weapons in any Syria government facility is justified. At about 12:00 PM Moscow time on 25 April, Sputnik broke their headline, later followed up with some details:
Last week, the fact-finding mission of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited a site in the Damascus suburb of Douma to collect samples in connection with the alleged April 7 chemical attack.
Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff Col. Gen. Sergey Rudskoy has announced that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had confirmed that there were no chemical weapons found at the Barzeh research center in Damascus despite the US officials’ claims.
The official further noted that thousands of people could have died if there was any chemical weapon on the sites that were attacked by the US-led coalition.
“Shortly after the airstrikes, many people visited those sites without any protective equipment. No one got any signs of gas-poisoning,” Colonel-General Sergey Rudskoy said.
TASS News Agency has corroborated this story. They also added more from Colonel-General Rudskoy:
“The US, British and French military and political authorities employed unclear logic while choosing targets for their attack. If they really believed that chemical weapons stockpiles actually existed, then their air strikes would have led to a large-scale contamination and as far as Damascus goes, tens of thousands of people would have been killed,” he said.
According to Rudskoi, in any country, chemical weapons facilities are scrupulously protected as they pose a great danger. “However, this cannot be said about the three facilities in question (the Barzeh Research and Development Center on the outskirts of Damascus and the Him Shinshar chemical weapons storage complex). There were only ordinary buildings there. Right after the air strikes, the facilities staff members and onlookers, who did not have any chemical protection equipment, flocked to the sites but no one suffered poisoning,” the Russian general stressed.
He added that neither of the three facilities hit by the US-led strikes had stored chemical weapons.
This is a major story, and a potentially huge embarassment for the strategy hawks in the US and Europe.
More than that, if verified, this finding reveals the serious politicization of the American intelligence apparatus, and possibly its subversion to forces that, shall we say, do not care one whit about reality, but rather, only American hegemony.
The story goes further, however.
Russian specialists are examining missiles of the US-led coalition, including Tomahawk, which were captured in Syria to improve Russian weapons, Rudskoy said Wednesday.
“Two [missiles] including Tomahawk cruise missile and a high-precision aviation missile were delivered to Moscow… They are now being examined by our experts. The results of this work will be used to improve Russian weapons,” he told a briefing.
Rudskoy further noted that only seven western missiles struck the Syrian Han Shinshar facility, which allegedly housed chemical weapons, not 22 as the Pentagon claims.
As we reported here at The Duran last week, these two missiles (now correctly identified as one Tomahawk cruise missile and one “aviation” missile (presumably air-to-ground)) are in Russia for inspection.
We do not expect to see this story picked up in Western mainstream media, except perhaps by the unusually plucky Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who has been unusually careful and skeptical of the government line, even while yet an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump.
This development underlines the relative quiet that has been the rule of the day for a while from Syria, and it may still support the present speculation here that this airstrike was a precision bit of political optics.
POSTSCRIPT: Since this article was written it has been pointed out to us by Holmes Lybrand, a fact checker at The Weekly Standard, that the Russian Ministry of Defence has not said that the OPCW has confirmed as part of its ongoing investigation no chemical weapons were found at the Barzeh facility. Please read our apology and correction.
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