Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
After publishing last week’s piece on Trump’s decision to fire almost $100M worth of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria, I decided to delve deeper into the reported Sarin gas attack on April 4 in Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province.
The official story is that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad used Sarin nerve gas against civilians in Idlib Province despite being on the verge of peace talks that would have left him in power and after having militarily reclaimed the city of Aleppo from rebels. I’m of the contention that the above narrative makes exactly no sense at all and most likely isn’t true.
Looking deeper into the footage circulating all over the Internet of the aftermath of the attack, I noticed another problem with the official story. The victims didn’t look much like victims of exposure to Sarin. Furthermore, none of the rescue personnel handling the victims with bare hands became injured from cutaneous Sarin exposure, which would have produced a lot of casualties among the Syrian White Helmets and other rescuers seen handling victims with little to no protective gear at all.
Videos and descriptions of the victims constantly refer to those exposed “gasping for breath,” “choking” and “foaming at the mouth,” all symptoms compatible with only very, very slight Sarin poisoning, or more acute effects from a different chemical. As I’ve been reading some of the ongoing coverage here in recent days, I find references to “Sarin” specifically seem to be decreasing in favor of the less-specific “chemical,” so, I can confidently assert I’m not the first person to notice this discrepancy between the official story and how Sarin works.
Sarin is a nerve agent. It’s colorless, odorless and can cause injury from inhalation or skin contact. It causes injury, and ultimately death unless specific antidotes are administered very quickly and then only to those with light exposure to the toxin. Once in the body, Sarin begins immediately interfering with the central nervous system by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, which breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is what tells muscle fibers to contract when it is released into the synaptic cleft between neurons and muscle fibers. Normally, acetylcholine is then broken down by the enzyme, allowing the muscle to relax. Since Sarin inhibits acetylcholinesterase, acetylcholine builds up in the synaptic cleft, and the brain signal to the muscle to keep contracting never gets shut off.
This then leads to uncontrollable spasmodic convulsions in the victim as their muscles are now not responding to the nervous system’s attempts to communicate. This inability to control voluntary muscles also just as quickly spreads to involuntary ones as well and death results from the loss of function of the diaphragm and other muscles related to maintaining cardio-vascular function. There’s little to no time to gasp for air. In cases of acute Sarin poisoning, there’s no conscious muscle control at all, like what we saw from victims in the videos.
According to a fact sheet prepared by Physicians for Human Rights, Sarin can only be conclusively proven after blood, urine or hair analysis is completed, yet the Turkish health officials don’t mention using those tests, relying instead on their observations of the bodies during autopsy. Furthermore, that same fact sheet states that survivors of Sarin poisoning need to be injected with atropine immediately and then as often as once every ten minutes thereafter for some time to counteract the effects of Sarin, which breaks down very slowly in the body. I’ve seen no footage of auto-injectors or other means being used to administer atropine to the victims and no mention of it in written reports.
It will likely be some time, if ever, that we know exactly what chemical agent was used in Idlib Province on April 4 and who dispersed it. If reality doesn’t match the mainstream media narrative, this wouldn’t be the first time.
“The Syrian Coalition, an umbrella opposition group, referred to the suspected chemical attack as a ‘crime similar to that in Eastern Ghouta in 2013 that the international community allowed to pass without accountability or punishment,’” CNN reported.
The reason Assad went unpunished for the 2013 attack is because it’s pretty apparent the rebels themselves were behind it. Even the New York Times has had to pull back from its assertion that Assad committed that particular chemical attack and the paper no longer includes it on their definitive list of Assad’s war crimes.
As I mentioned in my previous article, the various anti-Assad rebel groups have used chemical weapons more than 50 times since 2014. The April 4 attack comes less than one week after the US signaled that removing Assad from power was no longer a priority. The official story is that Assad, despite being about to win the war, invited international condemnation and intervention by using a weapon the UN previously confirmed he no longer has.
Who benefits from this attack? Certainly not Assad, and therefore it doesn’t help Russia either. In fact, the only people to benefit from the attack were the anti-Assad rebel groups who will get to fight on against the regime now without appearing to be the ones walking away from the negotiations – after all, one cannot be expected to negotiate with a monster who just gassed 70 civilians to death. By extension then, the attack also benefits the United States’ various oligarchs in the defense and oil industries, as the former gets to see their products used to secure the latter’s interests in the region.
Given the dearth of reliable facts, coming up with a workable hypothesis on what really happened April 4 is annoying as one must rely on assumptions. For the official story to be true, we must assume Assad’s homicidal mania overrides all of his other impulses and priorities, including self-preservation, remaining in power or actually winning the war he’s been fighting for six years.
To hypothesize that the rebels are behind the attack, one must assume that the rebels would be willing to do that which they’ve already done before in hopes of derailing peace talks after the US suggested Assad could remain in power, which would be their own worst nightmare.
Occam’s razor suggests we favor the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions. Given that the former, official one is full of assumptions and all of them quite large, the latter hypothesis is likely closer to the truth. And, better still, it at least makes sense.
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