The Syrian Sarin Threat

As Syria’s civil war approaches its inevitable, decisive final battle in the ancient capital of Damascus, the stakes are growing even higher. Amidst daily reports of violence spilling over the country’s borders and into neighboring Lebanon and Turkey, we learn that NATO has approved the shipment of Patriot missiles to Turkey to help it protect its border, and simultaneously, there is renewed talk that Bashar al-Assad’s regime may use its chemical weapons in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to power. On Wednesday, citing “U.S. officials,” NBC News reported that precursor elements of deadly sarin gas had been loaded onto aerial warheads by Syria’s armed forces. This was just two days after President Obama warned Assad publicly not to use his country’s chemical weapons, saying, “If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences, and you will be held accountable.” There are now increasingly frequent reports of Syrian government jets and helicopter gunships being shot down by rebels; it is surely not a coincidence that there are rumors that the rebels have finally been given some heat-seeking missiles in order to deny Assad’s forces their lethal monopoly on the skies. This is a crucial step forward for the rebels, whose military offensive launched last July against the government strongholds in Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s second city, bogged down under withering air assaults. Twenty-one months into the war, it is believed that as many as forty thousand Syrians have died, and that number grows by a thousand people, give or take a few hundred, every week. Most are civilians.

After a hiatus in the stream of high ranking officers and politicians fleeing the country to join the rebel diaspora, new rats are now leaving the long-sinking regime ship. A couple of days ago, Jihad Makdissi, the silver-tongued spokesman for the foreign ministry, suddenly vanished from his post and was reported to be heading for London, where he had last served as a diplomat—or, possibly, for the United States.

Curiously, given the timing of his departure, it was Makdissi who last summer confirmed the existence of his country’s long-rumored chemical-weapons caches, when he declared publicly that such weapons “will never be used unless Syria is exposed to external aggression.” During the international hullaballoo that followed, Assad’s regime denied the implications of Makdissi’s statement, claiming that he had been misunderstood or taken out of context. In the rebel heartlands around Aleppo, where I happened to be at the time reporting for The New Yorker, there were few doubts that Makdissi’s slipup, if that is what it was, had been intentional. “They said this on purpose,” a rebel officer told me angrily. “It’s the regime’s way of reminding us that it has such weapons, and if necessary, it will find a way to use them.”

Indeed, in a pinch, the “external aggression” concept trotted out by Makdissi could be easily stretched to encompass the various forms of foreign interference, such as the covert funding and arming of Syria’s rebels (reportedly by the U.S., Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and various European countries including Great Britain and France), that is currently occurring. And, of course, Assad was accusing his Syrian opponents of being steered by foreign hands long before the uprising got bloody.

Whatever the regime’s real intentions with regards to its chemical weapons, the next chapter in Syria will be an ugly one, and before it is all over, many people are going to die—from bullets and bombs, if not from sarin gas. Thanks to the boy-who-cried-wolf legacy of the Iraq invasion and the W.M.D.s-that-weren’t, it is not surprising that the alleged Syrian chemical-weapons threat has thus far failed to cause panic in international circles. This could prove to be an unfortunate historical lesson, for, as things stand, there is no guarantee that they won’t be deployed. And if they are used, Syria’s conflict will become a threshold conflict in more ways than one.

Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum.