The battle for the strategic city of Aleppo is described by some commentators as the Stalingrad of Syria’s bitter civil war. Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA), backed by Russian air support, has laid siege to the city, prompting a humanitarian crisis among the civilian population who are trapped in the fighting.
The city has an estimated population of around two million. Approximately 300,000 are believed to be corralled in the east of the city, where anti-Assad forces are attempting a dramatic breakout of their encirclement. As the battle reaches its zenith, reports have emerged of a chemical attack in the suburb of Zubdiya.
According to these reports, the attack consisted of a local, one-off incident that left three people dead. The reported details speak volumes about the plight of innocent civilians caught up in the escalating violence. The victims are described as a mother, her 10-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. The chemical agent used in the attack is described as chlorine gas.
Anti-Assad forces allege that the regime dropped the chemical weapon in the form of a barrel bomb from a helicopter. Other reports suggest that the chlorine gas was delivered by missile attack. Whatever the means of delivery, such an attack represents a war crime.
Chemical weapons are divided into several categories, including nerve agents, blood, burning, blister and older-generation choking agents.
Prior to the civil war, UN inspectors and weapons experts estimated that Assad’s regime held stockpiles of up to 1,000 metric tons of neurotoxins such as Sarin and other nerve agents.
When weaponised, these nerve agents are in gel or liquid form and carried in the warheads of artillery shells or missiles. Each projectile would carry a few litres of agent. In order to be fully effective, a concentrated artillery barrage would be required to generate sufficient levels of gas and aerosol to achieve an effective “kill ratio”.
Chemical attack
Such a sustained artillery barrage was used by Saddam Hussein’s forces in the infamous chemical weapon attack on the town of Halabja in 1988. In that attack Saddam’s forces used a blood agent, hydrogen cyanide, to murder 5,000 men, women and children.
Death by chemical weapon is always indiscriminate and excruciatingly painful. In Halabja, the victims would have drowned as their lungs filled with their own blood.
Assad’s regime is believed to have used the nerve agent Sarin in 2013 to kill 1,429 civilians in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Among the dead were 426 children. Such an attack, in terms of scale and concentration of fire, matches the profile of a conventional chemical attack mounted with the type of artillery assets available to a state actor.
Chlorine gas is a less sophisticated agent. Its use in the Syrian conflict has been confined to isolated, localised attacks with relatively few fatalities. Four people were reportedly killed in such an attack in Kafr Zita in 2014. Another chlorine gas attack is alleged to have taken place in Saraqeb, in Idlib province.
The Aleppo chlorine gas attack appears to be a sordid footnote to the overall conduct of the war there. The amount of agent believed to have been delivered suggests a random mix of chemical weapons among conventional high explosives and anti-personnel devices in order to maximise terror among the civilian population.
Whoever deployed such a device would be guilty of a war crime. Both sides accuse one another.
All parties to the conflict in Syria have been accused by agencies such as the UN, Human Rights Watch International and other NGOs of committing war crimes. We will probably never know who murdered this small family in Aleppo. However, the broader conduct of the battle for Aleppo clearly breaches the laws of armed conflict.
Anti-Assad forces, Jaish al-Fatah and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham – formerly Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra – are guilty of what the Geneva Conventions refer to as “wanton destruction” and “wilful killing” among the civilian population in SAA-held areas of the city. Contrary to article 51 (7) of the Geneva Conventions, both sides in the battle for Aleppo have refused to allow the civilian population to flee and are using them as de facto human shields – fighting in and among heavily populated residential districts.
Safe corridors
For its part, Assad’s SAA has refused to uphold the fourth Geneva Convention, article 17 of which requires it to facilitate the “removal from the besieged areas...of wounded, sick, infirm and aged persons, children and maternity cases”.
Neither Assad nor his Russian allies have provided safe evacuation corridors or neutralised zones as per article 15 of the Geneva Conventions. Aleppo is a microcosm of the civil war in Syria.
With Aleppo just 50km from the Turkish border, the outcome of the battle for control of the city is crucial to regional geopolitics and tensions between the Shia and Sunni in their struggle for ascendancy in a destabilised Middle East.
The Russians and the US are backing their sides in a regional conflict that stretches from Teheran in Iran to the capitals and palaces of the Gulf states.
In the meantime, the innocent Syrian civilians of Aleppo are butchered in situ, with absolutely no regard for the laws of armed conflict. Tom Clonan is a security analyst