Homs 2012 and the Genesis of Syria Chemical Weapons Narrative

Published simultaneously with UK Column

During the 2011-2014 war to overthrow the Syrian Government in 2011, its belligerents, specifically the US, Turkey, France, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel, have repeatedly accused the Syrian Government of both stockpiling and using chemical weapons (CW). These allegations relate to the periods both before and after the decision in August 2013 by the Syrian Government to dismantle its stockpile of strategic chemical weapons and abandon all chemical weapons programmes. Now that the Syrian Government has fallen and been replaced by an extremist group, Hay'at Tahir al-Sham (HTS), one which is funded and backed by the US and its allies, there continue to be calls to secure Syria's chemical weapons stocks and to eliminate purported CW programmes.

In fact, whether the government of Bashar al-Assad has ever actually used chemical weapons has always been controversial. The highest profile and most serious alleged attack occurred in August 2013, when, reportedly, a Sarin nerve agent rocket bombardment killed hundreds of civilians in Damascus. A joint Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - UN Joint Mission (OPCW-UN) investigation did not attribute responsibility for the attack, finding only that some party or other had carried out it out, whilst US journalist Seymour Hersh famously argued that responsibility lay with opposition groups seeking to frame the Syrian Government. In 2018, in another attack near Damascus and one which was initially claimed to involve the nerve agent Sarin, the subsequent OPCW Fact Finding Mission (FFM) became controversial when whistleblowers reported the manipulation and censorship of evidence during their investigation. The machinations ensured that the OPCW report reached a 'preordained conclusion' pointing the finger of blame at the Syrian government.

As the Syria chemical weapons narrative continues to be spun in the 'New Syria', this series presents a detailed, step-by-step examination of the major alleged chemical weapons incidents in Syria. The principal focus is on identifying the prima facie evidentiary basis for each alleged attack and, in tandem with this, establish where possible the primary information source for each allegation. The overarching objective of this series is to provide a starting point for further research aimed at providing a comprehensive case-by-case analysis of the Syria chemical weapons narrative. The series starts with the alleged nerve agent attack in the city of Homs on 23 December, 2012.

Background and Leadup

As William Van Wagenen documents in Origins of the Dirty War in Syria (forthcoming, 2025), the background to one of the early alleged chemical weapons attacks which occurred in in December 2012 was the Obama Administration's August 2012 declaration that the Syrian Government’s use of chemical weapons would constitute a 'red line' that, if crossed, would result in US military intervention. According to the Wall Street Journal, the 'red line' term had actually been initiated by Israeli intelligence officials and it was also heavily promoted by the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Presumably, President Obama understood his warning as intended to deter the Syrian government from using chemical weapons. The warning also, however, created an incentive for forces seeking to overthrow the Syrian Government to make sure the Syrian Government did cross that red line. In other words, Obama's 'red line' created a clear motivation for false flag attacks and staged events designed to either provoke the Syrian Government into actually deploying chemical weapons or, alternatively, to deceive people into thinking they had actually done so.

Already by the Summer of 2012 there were indications that such ideas were in circulation. During the early Autumn of 2012, a report published by the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, based upon a trip report to Turkey by Ammar Abdulhamid and which had involved interviews with 'free Syrian army officers in Antakya as well as rebel leaders and political activist from Syria', stated that an attempt had been made to frame the Syrian Government:

Recently, and following a take-over by rebels of a missile base near Damascus, one of the people affiliated with the old operations room encouraged rebels to claim that some missiles had chemical warheads in the hope that this will show the Americans that their redline was being challenged. The claim, of course, was ludicrous. A statement from the FSA denying this development was made. But the damage was done. The lack of consistent expert advice continues to plague the opposition in every effort they undertake.

As Van Wagenen makes clear, 'old operations room' referred to activities being conducted by two of the countries, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, that were seeking to overthrow the Syrian Government:

By ‘operations room’, Abdulhamid was referring to the ‘Istanbul control room’. Rania Abouzeid reported in September 2012 that, ‘a secretive group operates something like a command center in Istanbul, directing the distribution of vital military supplies believed to be provided by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and transported with the help of Turkish intelligence to the Syrian border and then to the rebels’, and that ‘Saudi Arabia's man’ in the control room was Lebanese Future Party politician Okab Sakr.

By the middle of Autumn, it was reported that 'Israel's top military commanders' had told the Pentagon that satellite imagery showed Syrian troops 'mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly gas sarin'. These reports were, according to Seymour Hersh, overreacting to what were simply standard military exercises.

So, in 2012, there was already evidence of questionable claims and reports from belligerent states suggesting CW activity by the Syrian Government. Then, in December 2012, reports emerged of an actual nerve agent attack in Homs involving the deaths of seven people.

The Alleged Attack in Homs, 23 December, 2012

On 24 December, Al Jazeera cited an opposition activist, Raji Rahmet Rabbou, who claimed that, 'The situation is different. We do not have enough gas masks. We don't know what this gas is, but medics are saying it's something similar to sarin gas'. Videos were released showing men receiving medical treatment in a hospital and the claims were accompanied by allegations from a high-ranking Syrian Army defector, Maj-Gen Abdul-Aziz Jassim al-Shallal, who claimed in a video that 'chemical weapons were used on Homs'. A newspaper article in The Independent was headlined'Syria's military police defector tells of nerve gas attack'.

Figure 1 Newspaper article, The Independent, December 2012.

Several weeks later, a US-based journalist, Josh Rogin, writing for Foreign Policy and in an article headlined'Exclusive: Secret State Department cable: Chemical weapons used in Syria', appeared to confirm a chemical weapons attack had occurred. His reporting seems to have been based largely on two sources of information. The first was a leaked cable sent from the US Istanbul Consulate to the State Department, which detailed an investigation into the alleged incident involving 'a series of interviews with activists, doctors, and defectors'. The second source appears to have been two doctors to whom The Cable (Foreign Policy's blog) had spoken.

Some of what the two doctors told The Cable appeared to support the original suggestions that a highly lethal nerve agent had been used. Dr Nashwan Abu Abdo, described as a neurologist, stated, ‘It was a chemical weapon, we are sure of that, because tear gas can’t cause the death of five people’. He also stated, ‘The main symptom of the respiratory ailments was bronchial secretions. This particular symptom was the cause of the death of all of the people. All of them died choking on their own secretions’. Most importantly, the telltale nerve agent symptom of constricted (or pinpoint) pupils was reported: ‘They all had miosis — pinpoint pupils’.

The leaked cable, however, stated that a chemical weapon short of a nerve agent had been used. State Department officials, familiar with the cable told Rogin that, ‘Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23’. Agent 15 [identified in the Foreign Policy article as equivalent to the chemical weapon “BZ”] is not a highly lethal nerve agent but rather a substance used to temporarily incapacitate and disorientate, not kill, whilst its telltale symptom is dilated - not constricted - pupils.

Rogin’s report, then, presented evidence for two contradictory claims about the chemical weapon that had supposedly been deployed. On the one hand it relayed indications that a highly lethal nerve agent had been deployed and, on the other hand, that a chemical agent – ‘Agent 15’ or BZ - designed to temporarily incapacitate, rather than to kill, had been used.

In addition, as chemical weapons researcher Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, was to subsequently point out, Agent 15, unlike BZ, does not actually exist as such and appears to be a fabrication that emerged from the British intelligence community during the propaganda drives of the late 1990s and early 2000s. These propaganda operations were designed to maintain the sanctions regime against Iraq for its alleged non-compliance with UN chemical and biological weapons directives. Ultimately, these deceptions would lead to the lie over Iraq's non-existent WMDs, a lie that was central to enabling the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Setting aside, then, the references to the mythical Agent 15 and staying with the idea that BZ had been used, could the contradictions between the initial reports and indications of a nerve agent attack and subsequent claims about a BZ chemical attack be resolved? Perhaps the truth of the matter was that a chemical attack involving BZ had been initially elevated to a nerve agent attack, via spin and exaggeration? This would still mean that a chemical weapons event had attack, only that it involved a weapon far less toxic than a nerve agent.

Even the lesser claim of BZ use was, however, problematic. Writing in The New Yorker the day after Rogin’s article, Raffi Khatchadourian explained that the treatment claimed to have been administered to the victims, according to Rogin’s medical sources, was Atropine, a standard treatment for nerve agents and which had supposedly helped the patients get better according to one of the doctors. But the same treatment given to a patient exposed to BZ would actually have made their condition much worse.

Furthermore, and as Van Wagenen documents, within a day of Rogin's article, Reuters was citingWhite House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying that Rogin’s reporting was not 'consistent with what we believe to be true about the Syrian chemical weapons program'. In other words, the US Government appeared to be saying that Syria was not believed to possess agents such as BZ. Indeed, it is unclear whether, in later years, BZ production was ever declared by either the Syrian Government or the OPCW DAT (Declarations Assessment Team) set up to monitor Syria’s compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

What was the source of all this confused, and confusing, information? Interestingly, the US Istanbul Consulate investigation had relied upon two organisations called ARK and BASMA. ARK was established by a 'former' British diplomat Alistair Harris (likely to be MI6) and described itself as 'delivering highly effective, politically-and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States' and overseeing $66 million of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria. BASMA was set up via ARK in 2012 and was purposed to'decrease support for the regime - increase support for the opposition - train a cadre of independent media'. Simply stated, a primary source for information about the 23 December Homs alleged attack turns out to have been a UK Government-funded 'influence operation'. Historically, such 'influence' activities are referred to as propaganda.

It is not clear from Rogin's reporting whether the two doctors spoken to, who were making apparently erroneous claims about symptoms indicative of a nerve agent attack, were also supplied via the ARK-BASMA nexus. However, by 22January, and in response to the official US debunking of his reporting, Rogin appeared willing to clearly direct his readers’ attention to the involvement of ARK and BASMA:

‘On December 23, [Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO)] implementing partner ARK reported through their media project BASMA on a possible chemical weapons attack in Homs, Syria’, the secret cable stated.‘This is the first time fighters from Homs, who are fighting to break a three-month long siege of the city, had come across such a possible attack. The suspected attack was originally reported by doctors receiving patients exhibiting symptoms of chemical exposure’.

Additionally, he wrote, ‘CSO officers spoke with three contacts, including a former Chief of Staff of the Syrian Arab Republic Government (SARG) chemical weapons arsenal, and confirmed the events and the symptoms and the number of casualties. CSO is not able to definitely say whether chemical weapons were in fact used in the December 23 attack’.

Back-pedalling quickly, Rogin concluded his second article by citing State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland:‘At the time we looked into the allegations that were made and the information that we had received, and we found no credible evidence to corroborate or to confirm that chemical weapons were used’. Rogin also wrote, ‘CNN reported Jan. 17 that the State Department conducted a subsequent investigation into the Homs incident after receiving the secret cable from Istanbul, whereby intelligence officers watched videos of the incident and concluded that the gas was not Agent 15 but rather an unspecified "riot control agent" that was misused by the Syrian regime’.

By 26 January, Jeffrey Lewis, was, to all intents and purposes, calling bullshit on the entire story and he emphasized the confused and misleading nature of the claims that had been surfacing. In a Foreign Policy article, titled Buzz Bomb, he wrote:

Incapacitating agents, by the way, are not what one usually thinks of as ‘chemical weapons’ — nerve gas and the like. BZ and other chemical incapacitants arise out of the same deep well of craziness that led the government to develop LSD. The Chemical Weapons Convention largely dried up the crazy. We haven’t seen something spectacularly stupid since 1994, when the predecessor of the Air Force Research Laboratory was considering a proposal to develop a chemical agent that would ‘cause homosexual behavior’ in the hopes of adversely affecting‘discipline and morale’. Incapacitating agents like BZ are controlled under Schedule 2 of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Schedule 1 is where are all the interesting things like mustard gas, sarin, and VX are listed. States do not even need to declare Schedule 2 chemicals if they are present in ‘low concentrations’. In 2004, the states party to the CWC had a very boring, technical debate about when states should declare incidental production of BZ and two other Schedule 2 chemicals.

Remarkably, despite the apparent derailing of the narrative surrounding the alleged Homs chemical attack, it was to surface again during the runup to the infamous Ghouta August 2013 mass casualty attack when the British Government, along with France, cited it in communications with the UN. Asked by the UN Security Council for further information, the UK apparently wrote again on 25 March and 23 May, 2013. The OPCW-UN Joint Mission, however, concluded that it 'did not receive sufficient or credible information' regarding this alleged incident and, consequently, struck the incident from their investigations list.

Conclusions

In sum, an alleged event involving five to seven deaths and with doctors reporting nerve agent symptoms quickly became downgraded to a BZ chemical weapons attack and then, according to some US officials, either a chemical attack involving riot control gas or, otherwise, that there was no credible evidence of any chemical attack. Neither riot control gas nor BZ are designed to kill, and nor do they cause constricted pupils. Moreover, Syria was not understood to actually possess the BZ chemical weapon.

A key conduit for at least one of the allegations, regarding the use of 'Agent 15', was a UK Government-sponsored'influence' operation: the ARK-BASMA nexus. It is also plausible that Rogin's medical sources, who reported apparently erroneous nerve agent symptoms, had also been supplied via the ARK-BASMA propaganda operation. Ultimately, the basis for the claims was so weak that the US State Department rejected the allegation whilst the UN-OPCW mission declined to investigate it.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the initially reported event, involving videos and testimony from doctors, was not a nerve agent attack. The allegation was untrue and this leaves us with two possibilities. The first is that those making the allegation, or rather reporting the alleged attack, were confused and then made erroneous claims. The second is that they knowingly made exaggerated claims in order to deceive the world into thinking a sarin-like nerve agent attack had occurred. Subsequent claims about the mythical Agent 15 and BZ were equally problematic and did not stand up to scrutiny.

In 2013, a leading authority on chemical and biological weapons, the late Julian Perry Robinson, commented that, 'Theragbag symptomatology described, and especially the references to “Agent 15”, suggest that the reporting includes at least some misinformation, if not outright disinformation'. Robinson went on to caution that, 'in the international and domestic politics of the intensifying civil war, there exist incentives to spread falsehoods or otherwise deceive opinion, a situation now much exacerbated by the “red line” utterances of the US administration'.

Right from the start of the Syrian chemical weapons narrative, then, we can observe documented attempts to deceive, witness the Foundation for Defence of Democracies report, and then an alleged nerve agent attack occurring for which the evidentiary basis was manifestly lacking.

As we shall see in subsequent articles, later alleged chemical weapons attacks were no less problematic.