Russian Claims of a "False Flag" Chemical Weapons Attack in Douma, Syria

Mick West

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douma_chemical_attack

On 7 April 2018, a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma reportedly killed at least 70 people.[5] On-site medics stated that exposure to chlorine gas and sarin nerve agent killed the victims.[6] The attack was attributed to the Syrian Army. The Syrian Government and its allies, Iran and Russia, said that the chemical attack either had never taken place or was a "false flag" attack by Syrian rebels.
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When Alex Jones talks about a "false flag" attack it's usually something ridiculous, like the idea that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, or the Boston Marathon Bombings were fake — things claimed only by extreme conspiracy theorists. But the latest theory he's pushing is no wild concoction of idle minds, but is instead straight from the highest levels of the Russian Government.

https://www.rt.com/news/424280-russia-evidence-chemical-attack-staged/

Moscow has “irrefutable proof” that the alleged chemical incident in Syria’s Douma was a “false-flag attack,” orchestrated by UK security services with support from the United States, the Russian envoy to the OPCW said.
“We have not just a ‘high level of confidence,’ as our Western partners uniformly put it; we have irrefutable proof that there was no chemical attack in Douma on April 7,” Russia’s Ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons Aleksandr Shulgin said at a special meeting of the UN chemical watchdog’s executive council. The diplomat added that the incident had been a “pre-planned false-flag attack by the British security services, which could have also been aided by their allies in Washington.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...claims-it-was-behind-staged-syrian-gas-attack

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said he had obtained documentary evidence showing that “special services of a country, which is now seeking to be in the first ranks of the Russophobic campaign, were involved in this staged event”. The UK Foreign Office said the claims were preposterous.

Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to London, told reporters the UK-funded Syrian civil defence forces, the White Helmets, were responsible for staging fake chemical attacks by the Syrian army in an attempt to mislead the world. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian defence ministry spokesman, went further saying: “We have … evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organising this provocation.”

He said Russia had proof that London put pressure on the White Helmets to stage the attack. The White Helmets is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers who rescue civilians from the rubble after airstrikes.
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Russian appears to have some foreknowledge that something like this was going to happen:


On 13 March 2018, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, said that the Russian military had "reliable intelligence" that suggested the rebels holding Eastern Ghouta, along with the White Helmets activists, were preparing to stage and film a chemical weapons attack against civilians, which the U.S. government would blame on the Syrian forces and use as a pretext to bomb the government quarter in Damascus.[17][18][19] In the event that the lives of Russian servicemen should be threatened by U.S. strikes, Gerasimov said Russia would respond militarily — "against both the missiles and the platforms from which they’re launched".[20][21] Gerasimov′s statement was interpreted by Nic Robertson of CNN as an indication that the chemical attack in Douma had been planned by Russia in advance as an asymmetric warfare tactic in response to reactions by the West after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.[22]
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The idea that the White Helmets (a volunteer organization that carries out urban search and rescue after bombings, as well as other civil defense work) is somehow fake (or terrorist) has achieved some traction. A few days ago former Pink Floyd frontman Rodger Waters joined in, telling the crowd at a concert in Barcelona

https://www.timesofisrael.com/roger-waters-claims-syrias-white-helmets-a-fake-organization/
I believe ... the White Helmets — are a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists.
...
What we should do is go and persuade our governments not to go and drop bombs on people. And certainly not until we have done all the research that is necessary so that we would have a clear idea of what is really going on. Because we live in the world where propaganda seems to be more important than the reality of what is really going on.”
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The latter part of his message resonates with a lot of people — not particularly be cause they trust Russia (or know anything about the White Helmets), but because they are opposed to a rush towards military action, and possibly war. I've seen similar things being shared by my UK friends and relatives.

This "White Helmets are jihadist/imperialist propagandists" part seems to get accepted because it's attached to something people are in favor of (anti-war, anti-Tory, or anti-Israel), but multiple investigations conclude that this is largely the result of a Russian propaganda campaign. even the left-leaning Guardian newspaper:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories

The Syrian volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets have become the target of an extraordinary disinformation campaign that positions them as an al-Qaida-linked terrorist organisation.

The Guardian has uncovered how this counter-narrative is propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government (which provides military support to the Syrian regime).

The Guardian spoke to several researchers studying the spread of disinformation and propaganda online who have found evidence of a targeted Russian influence campaign against the White Helmets.

Fil Menczer, a computer science professor at Indiana University, has developed a tool called Hoaxy to chart the spread of misinformation online. Searching for “White Helmets” reveals a handful of sources generated hundreds of stories about the organisation. “It’s like a factory,” he said.

The same handful of people are quoted as “experts” in articles that are repackaged and interlinked to create a body of content whose conspiracy claims gain a semblance of legitimacy.

The analytics firm Graphika has spent years analysing a range of Russian disinformation campaigns including those around the Macron leaks and the Russian doping scandal. In research commissioned by the human rights group the Syria Campaign, it found that the patterns in the online network of the 14,000 Twitter users talking about the White Helmets looked “very similar” and included many known pro-Kremlin troll accounts, some of which were closed down as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the US election. Other accounts appeared to generate more than 150 tweets per day (more than 70 is seen by scholars studying bots as suspicious).
...
Separately, both Graphika and Menczer’s Hoaxy tool identify Beeley, the British blogger, as among the most influential disseminators of content about the White Helmets.
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Germany's Der Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/syrien-russlands-feldzug-gegen-die-wahrheit-a-1184533.html
[German, Google translation]
Russia slanders civilian aid workers in Syria and casts doubt on Assad's poison gas attacks. A study now shows how systematically the Kremlin is proceeding in its disinformation campaign.
...
Blogger Vanessa Beeley, at the heart of this Russian-backed disinformation campaign, has stated repeatedly in public that these humanitarians can be legally killed. “White Helmets are not getting it. We know they are terrorists. Makes them a legit target,” she said on Twitter.

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Who is Vanessa Beeley? This brings us back toward Alex Jones, according to the Guardian:
Beeley frequently criticises the White Helmets in her role as editor of the website 21st Century Wire, set up by Patrick Henningsen, who is also a former editor at Infowars.com.
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21stcenturywire is a pro-Russian conspiracy theory site, and appears as a key node in this analysis linking it to Russian propaganda outlets RT.com and sputniknews.com

Source: https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/910988793125023745?


21stcenturywire is not a credible source. For example it suggests that no plane hit the Pentagon, Sandy Hook was a scripted event, and it even supports the chemtrails theory. And yet its editor, Beeley is one of the main sources of the claims against the White Helmets. To the extent that a "report" by her (largely citing herself) was submitted to the United Nations by the Russian ambassador.

The stakes here are vastly higher than the usual raft of conspiracy theories about historical events. This is an ongoing conflict, a proxy war with the potential of significant escalation. While there may well have been a overly hasty push for a military response from the west, Russia is clearly operating a sophisticated propaganda campaign.

A good question here is why Syria (and by extension Russia) would carry out a chemical attack when there was no military advantage from doing so, and there would likely be repercussions. But if they planned all along to blame it on the west and the White Helmets as part of some global anti-Russian conspiracy, then the best time to do it for propaganda purposes would be when it was the least advantageous for military purposes.


Resources:

 
Rebel fighters began leaving Douma after the chemical attack. Perhaps that was the objective of the attack, to smoke out the holdouts.
"Rebel fighters begin leaving Syria's Douma after weeks-long military assault"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ter-weeks-long-military-assault-idUSKBN1HF09Z

Assad may have been emboldened after the West didn't respond to smaller chlorine gas attacks, and after the Russian military said it would respond to U.S. strikes on Syria.

Even the latest Western air strikes in response to the chemical attack didn't have much effect, according to defense experts like Anthony Cordesman.
Some defense experts poured cold water over Pentagon claims Saturday that the U.S.-led strike set back Syria's chemical weapons program "for years". Experts suggest chlorine gas or other chemical agents like mustard gas are still available from an industrial base so difficult to fully eliminate.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/15/exp...on-setting-back-syria-weapons-capability.html
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Assad may have miscalculated that the West wouldn't respond to a chemical attack, or calculated that a quick defeat of Douma is worth the risk of limited Western airstrikes.
 
Eliot Higgins called out mainstream publications for promoting chemical attack denialism.

While chemical attack denialism has often been relegated to fringe and Russian state media, there have been occasions where more mainstream voices and media organizations have promoted claims about chemical attacks that are riddled with inaccuracies...
Presenting these views in mainstream publications, be they the London Review of Books, Welt or Newsweek, is not presenting another perspective, or encouraging debate; it’s promoting the idea that facts are no longer sacred; truth is a matter of opinion; official bodies set up to investigate these incidents are compromised; victims are performers; and rescuers are belligerents.
This is dangerous, Orwellian inversion of reality. This is not the debate on Iraq’s WMD, this is the debate on whether or not Sandy Hook victims were really crisis actors, or if Israelis were told not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
This is what Russia wants, and this is what Assad wants, as it lets the perpetrators escape justice, and leaves the victims to rot.
http://www.newsweek.com/what-truth-about-chemical-attacks-syrian-civilians-805264
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@Vostok

You wrote:

He seems to suggest that the chance of a false flag is possible, and that Assad lacked the motive for the use of such weapons. He also seems confident in his assessment that the White Helmets are not the most trustworthy source of information. Simply due to the fact that they operate in only rebel held territory seems to discard their impartiality.
This is part of Russia’s standard misinformation and agitprop. Because the White Helmets are primarily funded by the UK, USA, other western governments and the UN it is standard for Russia to make every effort to discredit them.

The reason they operate primarily in rebel held regions does not reflect on their impartiality. They operate in these areas simply because they are the areas being shelled and bombed. The various rebel groups have no airpower and very little artillery so it is not the government held areas that are subjected to bombing or shelling.

If you need to fish go where the fish are.

If they are partial then they are doing a convincing job of hiding it as about 160 of them have been killed. A rare occurrence for a false flag.
 
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Robert Fisk from the Independent claims to have visit Douma and also havent found any evidence for a chlorine-gas-attack according to locals:

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself,
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as for the "white helmets" reads:

People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
[...]
...Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...uma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html
 
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Robert Fisk from the Independent claims to have visit Douma and also havent found any evidence for a chlorine-gas-attack according to locals:

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself,
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as for the "white helmets" reads:

People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
[...]
...Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...uma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

You miss some relevant context there


As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?

By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.
...
[Rahaibani] “I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. "
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The account given is "what all the doctors know", but not something he himself saw.

Frisk also wrote (in 2007):
https://web.archive.org/web/20070827183903/http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it?

The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
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Which seems to indicate a certain preference for questioning the official account at the expense of objectivity.
 
Bellingcat's analysis
Summary:
  1. A large compressed gas cylinder of a type used in previous aerial chlorine attacks was filmed on top of the building where a large number of fatalities were documented.
  2. The number of dead bodies that can be established through open source data is 34+.
  3. Aircraft spotters reported two Mi-8 Hip helicopters heading southwest from Dumayr Airbase, in the direction of Douma, 30 minutes before the chemical attack in Douma, and two Hip helicopters were observed above Douma shortly before the attack.
  4. The Syrian Government has previously been identified as using Mi-8 Hip helicopters to drop chlorine cylinders on opposition held areas.
Conclusion: Based on the available evidence, it is highly likely the 34+ victims killed in the 1930 attack on the apartment building near al-Shuhada Square were killed as a result of a gas cylinder filled with what is most likely chlorine gas being dropped from a Hip helicopter originating from Dumayr Airbase.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/men...lleged-chemical-attacks-douma-7th-april-2018/
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Frisk also wrote (in 2007):
oh.
Which seems to indicate a certain preference for questioning the official account at the expense of objectivity
*sigh* yes, absolutly.

Edit/

From a comment from the analysis of bellingcat (https://www.bellingcat.com/news/men...7th-april-2018/comment-page-5/#comment-151628):

“In August rebel forces took Sabbagh’s factory by force, as part of a sweep that also netted them an electricity station and a military airport about 30 km from Aleppo. Sabbagh, who has since fled Aleppo for Beirut, says his factory is now occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group with strong ties to al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. He knows this because his site manager has struck a deal with the rebels — they supply 200 L of fuel a day to keep the generator running so that the valves of his $25 million factory don’t freeze up. The factory isn’t operational anymore, but this way at least, says Sabbagh, it might be one day in the future. In the meantime, he has no idea what has happened, if anything, to the 400 or so steel barrels of chlorine gas he had stored in the compound. The yellow tanks, which hold one ton of gas each, are used for purifying municipal water supplies. “No one can know for certain, but if it turns out chlorine gas was used in the attack, then the first possibility is that it was mine. There is no other factory in Syria that can make this gas, and now it is under opposition control,” he says.
To Faris al-Shehabi, head of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry and a strong government supporter, it was obvious from Day One that the rebels had their eyes on the gas. “Why else would they capture a factory in the middle of nowhere? For the sniper positions?” he asks sarcastically while meeting TIME in Beirut, where he is traveling for business. “We warned back then that chemical components were in the hands of terrorists, but no one listened.”
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http://world.time.com/2013/04/01/syrias-civil-war-the-mystery-behind-a-deadly-chemical-attack/

that was 2013; did I miss something?!?
 
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The Associated Press spoke to rescuers, medics and numerous residents of Douma for their accounts of what took place. Some were reached in rebel-held areas in northern Syria where they were evacuated after the attack, while others were still in Douma.
They spoke of at least two buildings with people sheltering in the basements that were overwhelmed with gas so strong that it was hard to breathe hundreds of meters (yards) away.
An AP team visited the site on a Syrian government-organized tour Monday, including a two-room underground shelter where one resident said 47 people were killed, including his pregnant wife and two young daughters.
A strange smell lingered, nine days after the attack.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/a...chlorine-then-chaos-and-death-in-syria-attack
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