The Wikileaks portal published a letter from one of the employees of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which he sent to his superiors in June 2018. In it, he pointed out that in the process of preparing a report on the results of the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Duma on April 7, 2018, serious distortions of the facts were committed.

Recall that the OPCW's final report stated that the use of chemical weapons in the Duma did indeed take place. The culprit of the attack was not called in the document, since its definition is not part of the organization’s functions. However, it is mentioned that a bomb filled with a poisonous substance was dropped from the air.

Even before the completion of the investigation, the Western Allies blamed government forces for events in the Duma. On April 14, 2018, troops from the United States, Britain and France attacked targets in Assad-controlled parts of Syria.

The author of the letter published by Wikileaks was in the Duma and was directly involved in the investigation of the circumstances of the alleged chemical attack. He claims that during the preparation of the preliminary version of the report, changes were made to the text as directed by the Office of the Director General of the OPCW, as a result of which essential details that influenced the reliability of the document disappeared. According to him, in the OPCW report, the facts are presented selectively, and in some cases false conclusions were made.

What was not indicated

The edited report states that there is sufficient evidence to support the claim that chlorine or another chlorine-containing chemical was used in the Duma, the author writes. According to him, at the site of the alleged events, “one or more chemicals with an active chlorine atom” was actually discovered, but in very small quantities. He noted that among these chemicals there could be an ingredient in “household bleach based on chlorine”.

  • Chemical container shown to reporters in the Duma
  • Reuters
  • © Ali Hashisho

One of the evidence that chemical weapons were used in the Duma was a video of the victims of the attack. At the same time, the symptoms demonstrated in the video do not correspond to what the witnesses interviewed by the mission saw, the letter states. All of this was omitted in the edited version of the OPCW report.

“The exclusion of this part from the report (including the completely cut out epidemiological section) has an extremely negative effect on it, since the information contained in it is inextricably linked to the identified chemical substance. In this case, doubts about whether it is a question of chlorine or any other toxic substance with a suffocating effect are caused precisely by the discrepancies between the stated and observed symptoms. The presence of these discrepancies was not only noted by the fact-finding mission team, but was also largely confirmed by three toxicologists with experience in studying cases of injuries with chemical warfare agents, ”the employee writes in a letter.

Another controversial issue is the question of how to deliver the chemical. In the edited version, according to the author of the letter, it was alleged that the gas was contained in cylinders found at the scene of the alleged incident. However, the original text noted that the investigators did not have sufficient evidence to support this.

For their part, Wikileaks recalled that the OPCW commission arrived in the Duma only two weeks after the alleged attack. Such a delay was associated with the battles taking place in that area. After arrival, experts found that a significant part of the evidence, including the bodies of the dead, was no longer available for investigation.

  • OPCW headquarters building in The Hague
  • Reuters
  • © Michel Kooren

According to Boris Dolgov, a senior fellow at the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, WikiLeaks will affect the reputation of the OPCW.

“The publication once again confirms the dishonesty of this organization. Russian experts previously said that the OPCW reports do not correspond to what actually happened in Syria, ”he said.