For the first time since the start of the Syrian civil war, in 2011, the carnage with chemical weapons, committed by the Damascus regime, landed on the office of a prosecutor. On Monday, October 5, three Syrian and international NGOs – Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), Syrian Archive and the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression – lodged a complaint for crimes against humanity, before the Karlsruhe prosecutor’s office, in Germany, by virtue of the principle of universal jurisdiction, in force across the Rhine.
The complaint, which targets the Syrian authorities, concerns two sarin gas offensives, a neurotoxic, colorless, odorless and extremely lethal: that perpetrated on August 21, 2013, in Eastern Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus, fatal to 1,200 people according to the complainants; and that of April 4, 2017 on Khan Cheikhoun, a town of some 30,000 inhabitants, on the strategic road linking Damascus to Aleppo, which caused 200 deaths.
“It was like hell, it was beyond any other attack, tells the Syrian war photographer Artino about the massacre in Ghouta, which he survived, before taking refuge in Europe the following year. The air attacks or the mortar attacks were already very hard. But the chemical attacks were a whole new level of horror ”, adds the photographer, some of whose photos appear in the prosecution file.
“Behind the sarin gas attacks, there is the entire program of scientific research and production of chemical weapons of the Syrian regime, and their use, decided at the highest level of government ”, argues Steve Kostas of the Open Society Justice Initiative. According to the testimony of a deserter cited in the complaint, the attack on Eastern Ghouta, a region near Damascus, ” has been authorized “ by President Bashar Al-Assad then ordered by his brother, Maher, commander of the 4e division.
General Ghassan Abbas, head of branch 450 of the Center for Scientific Studies and Research (CERS), the Syrian chemical program established in the 1970s, ” was present “ and would have “Supervised the arming of rockets with chemical warheads”. As for the attack on Khan Cheikhoun, in April 2017, it would have been approved by the Head of State, then led by Ali Abdullah Ayyoub, Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff at the time, and by several air force officers.
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