The ‘Assad Chemical Attack’ Narrative Has As Many Holes As Craters in Syrian Soil

Alex the Younger
4 min readApr 14, 2018
The Damascus sky lights up with surface-to-air missile fire as a U.S.-led attack targeted different parts of the Syrian capital early Saturday, April 14, 2018.

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
— George Orwell

For those uninformed about the Syrian Conflict:
The Middle East is a total disaster; very little makes sense out there. For the understandably ignorant, here’s a post I wrote up about two years ago that will inform you on the parties involved in the conflict. It is out of date, especially with the fall of the Islamic State (ISIS) earlier this year, and keep in mind that Islamic rebel groups are always rebranding themselves, but it will help clear the air about who’s been killing who for the past decade.

This is the third time this decade that the nations of the world will hold Bashar al-Assad responsible for using chemical weapons on his own civilians. It is also the second time that America has responded with knee-jerk military force before investigation, the prior two investigations coming up inconclusive. The simple fact of the matter is that we have no idea who’s gassing civilians, but it is certain that when Assad supposedly attacks his people, America and other forces of the world will absolutely attack his people.

There has always been reason to believe that these attacks are staged by militant rebels, i.e. al-Qaeda variants, many of which the US has openly funded and trained in the recent past. President Obama was in the business of outsourcing war with proxy soldiers — we could halfway count on al-Qaeda to destroy things we didn’t like. But the rebels are people who cannot be trusted, often composed of the Islamic brainwashed, Marxist socialists, and delusional post-pubescent young men, all of which are extremely violent. These are exactly the kinds of people who would gas innocent civilians and blame it on Bashar al-Assad, the aim of their rebellion.

There’s also reason to question whether an attack even took place. British ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, made a very reasonable argument on a BBC talkshow for why he doesn’t believe Assad gassed his own people, but also why we should question whether an attack even happened. According to him, not one source for this attack comes from a reliable source, every source of this attack comes from Islamist armed groups, and that the images, (which make up most of the evidence for this attack), are probably faked. That’s a bold claim, but this is someone who’s been to Syria, someone who knows how these people operate; these tactics are not beneath them.

Bashar al-Assad is an evil tyrant, but he is always about to be killed, and he still only has one gullet to slit. If you think critically about this, who is more likely to purposely gas civilians? Assad, a man in the very precarious position of being a sort of middle-man between a Russia/US proxy war, who by the way, has just recently gained support for the near-elimination of ISIS, or groups of violent terrorists who hate Bashar al-Assad? At the very least, you must admit that the whole ordeal is extremely fishy.

But how could these terrorist sand-yokels come up with the resources and knowledge to successfully execute a sarin gas attack? Sarin gas is a very volatile substance that must be transported in specific ways. It requires significant resources, which leads people to believe that a formal military, like Assad’s, is behind the attack. But the evidence is still unclear as to whether sarin gas was even used, Syrian officials have claimed that chlorine gas was used, which may deliver similar effects to sarin.

We simply don’t know, but we do know that some of these terrorist groups have been funded and trained by some of the largest militaries in the world. Without much government aid, ISIS was able to raise billions of dollars through extortion tactics. Imagine what resources the rebels, who are nearly equally violent, could drum up with the help of government support.

Those who would wonder why the US would jump to attack without evidence should be quickly reminded of the reason we invaded Iraq, to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Many intelligence officers knew that the evidence for WMD was being fabricated. Those with integrity walked out of the job to later expose the truth. We now know for a fact that the US government lied about why they were going to war with Iraq, and here’s 16 articles to prove it.

Why should we think it’s different this time?

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Alex the Younger

Satisfying my endless curiosity, and maybe yours too | Software Engineer | Praxis Alumni