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Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Let me make a little progress.

In my speech I want to do three things: explain what we know; set out the path we will follow; and try to answer all of the difficult questions that have been put to me. Let me try to make some progress and I promise I will take interventions as I go along. Let me set out what we know about what happened.

Médecins sans Frontières reported that in just three hours, on the morning of 21 August, three hospitals in the Damascus area received approximately 3,600 patients with symptoms consistent with chemical weapons attacks. At least 350 of those innocent people died. The video footage illustrates some of the most sickening human suffering imaginable. Expert video analysis can find no way that this wide array of footage could have been fabricated, particularly the behaviour of small children in those shocking videos.

There are pictures of bodies with symptoms consistent with that of nerve agent exposure, including muscle spasms and foaming at the nose and mouth. I believe that anyone in this Chamber who has not seen these videos should force themselves to watch them. One can never forget the sight of children’s bodies stored in ice, and young men and women gasping for air and suffering the most agonising deaths—all inflicted by weapons that have been outlawed for nearly a century.

The Syrian regime has publicly admitted that it was conducting a major military operation in the area at that time. The regime resisted calls for immediate and unrestricted access for UN inspectors, while artillery and rocket fire in the area reached a level about four times higher than in the preceding 10 days. There is intelligence that Syrian regime forces took precautions normally associated with chemical weapons use.

Examining all this evidence, together with the available intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee has made its judgments, and has done so in line with the reforms put in place after the Iraq war by Sir Robin Butler. Today, we are publishing the key judgments in a letter from the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The letter states that

“there is little serious dispute that chemical attacks causing mass casualties on a larger scale than hitherto…took place on 21 August”.

On the Syrian opposition, the letter states:

“There is no credible intelligence or other evidence to substantiate the claims or the possession of CW”—

that is, chemical weapons—

“by the opposition.”

The Joint Intelligence Committee therefore concludes:

“It is not possible for the opposition to have carried out a CW attack on this scale.”

It says this:

“The regime has used CW on a smaller scale on at least 14 occasions in the past. There is some intelligence to suggest regime culpability in this attack. These factors make it highly likely that the Syrian regime was responsible.”

Crucially, the JIC Chairman, in his letter to me, makes this point absolutely clear. He says

“there are no plausible alternative scenarios to regime responsibility.”

I am not standing here and saying that there is some piece or pieces of intelligence that I have seen, or the JIC has seen, that the world will not see, that convince me that I am right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. I am saying that this is a judgment; we all have to reach a judgment about what happened and who was responsible. But I would put it to hon. Members that all the evidence we have—the fact that the opposition do not have chemical weapons and the regime does, the fact that it has used them and was attacking the area at the time, and the intelligence that I have reported—is enough to conclude that the regime is responsible and should be held accountable.