By: Gareth Porter
March 13, 2017
U.N. investigators
increasingly make their conclusions fall in line with Western propaganda,
especially on the war in Syria, as occurred in a distorted report about last
year’s attack on an aid convoy, explains Gareth Porter.
The March 1
report by the
United Nations’ “Independent International Commission of Inquiry“
asserted that the bloody attack on a humanitarian aid convoy west of Aleppo
City on Sept. 19, 2016, was an airstrike by Syrian government planes. But an
analysis of the U.N. panel’s report shows that it was based on an account of
the attack from the pro-rebel Syrian “White Helmets” civil defense organization
that was full of internal contradictions.
The UN
account also was not supported by either the photographic evidence that the
White Helmets provided or by satellite imagery that was available to the
commission, according to independent experts. Further undermining the UN
report’s credibility, the White Helmets now acknowledge that rockets they
photographed were not fired from Russian or Syrian planes but from the ground.
Like last
December’s summary of the UN’s Headquarters
Board of Inquiry report on the same incident, the Commission’s
report described the attack as having begun with “barrel bombs” dropped by
Syrian helicopters, followed by further bombing by fixed-wing planes and,
finally, strafing by machine guns from the air.
The March 1
report did not identify any specific source for its narrative, citing only
“[c]ommunications from governments and non-government organizations.” But in
fact the UN investigators accepted the version of events provided by the White
Helmets chief in Aleppo province as well as specific evidence that the White
Helmets had made public.
The White
Helmets, which are heavily funded by Western governments and operate only in
rebel-controlled areas, are famous for using social media to upload videos
purporting to show injured children and other civilian victims of the war.
Last year,
a well-organized campaign pushed the group’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize
and a Netflix film
about the group won an Oscar last month. The United Nations and the
mainstream Western news media have frequently relied on White Helmets
accounts from war zones that are not accessible to outsiders. But the White
Helmets’ officials have pursued an obvious political agenda in support of
opposition forces in Al Qaeda-dominated zones in Aleppo and Idlib where they
have operated.
On Sept.
19, immediately after the attack on the aid convoy, the chief of the White
Helmets organization in the Aleppo governorate, Ammar al-Selmo, presented a
dramatic narrative of a Russian-Syrian air attack, but it was marked by obvious
internal contradictions.
At first,
Selmo claimed in an
interview that he had been more than a kilometer away from the
warehouses where the attack occurred and had seen Syrian helicopters dropping
“barrel bombs” on the site. But his eyewitness account would have been
impossible because it was already dark by the time he said the attack began at
about 7:15 p.m. He changed his
story in a later interview, claiming that he had been right across
the street at the moment of the attack and had heard the “barrel bombs” being
dropped rather than seeing them.
Selmo
insisted in a video filmed that night that the attack began with Syrian
helicopters dropping eight “barrel
bombs,” which are described as large, crudely constructed bombs
weighing from 250 kg to 500 kg or even more. Citing a box-shaped indentation in
the rubble, Selmo said the video is showing “the box of the barrel bomb,” but
the indentation is far too small to be a crater from such a bomb.
Selmo
continued the account, “Then the regime also target this place with cluster
bombs two times, and also the aircraft of the Russians target this place with
C-5 and with bullets,” apparently referring to Soviet-era S-5 rockets. The
White Helmets photographed two such rockets and sent it to media outlets,
including the Washington Post, which published the
picture in the Post story with credit to the White Helmets.
Story
Contradictions
But Hussein
Badawi, apparently the White Helmet official in charge of the Urum al Kubrah
area, contradicted
Selmo’s story. In a separate interview, Badawi said the attack had
begun not with “barrel bombs” but with “four consecutive rockets” that he said
had been launched by government forces from their defense plant in Aleppo
province – meaning that it was a ground-launched attack rather than an air
attack.
In an email
response to a query from me, Selmo retracted his own original claim about the
S-5 rockets. “[B]efore aircraft’s attack on the area,” he wrote, “many land to
land missiles attacked the place coming from the defense factories which [are]
located in eastern Aleppo [east of] the city, regime controlled area. [T]hen
aircraft came and attacked the place.”
But such a
rocket attack from that “regime controlled area” would not have been
technically possible. The Syrian government defense plant is located in Safira,
25 kilometers
southeast of Aleppo City and even farther from Urum al-Kubrah,
whereas the S-5 rockets that the White Helmets photographed have a range of only three or four
kilometers.
Moreover,
the Russians and Syrian government forces were not the only warring parties to
have S-5s in their arsenal. According to a study of the
S-5 rocket by Armament Research Services consultancy, Syrian armed
opposition forces had been using S-5 rockets as well. They had gotten them from
the CIA’s covert program of moving weapons from Libyan government stockpiles to
be distributed to Syrian rebels beginning in late 2011 or early 2012. Syrian
rebels had used improvised launch systems to fire them, as the ARS study
documented with a picture.
Significantly,
too, the explicit claim by Selmo that Russian planes were involved in the
attack, which was immediately echoed by the Pentagon, was summarily dismissed
by the UN panel report, which stated flatly, without further explanation, that
“no Russian strike aircraft were nearby during the attack.”
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Misplaced
Evidence
Yet,
despite the multiple discrepancies in the White Helmets’ story, the UN
investigators said they corroborated the account of the air attack “by a site
assessment, including analysis of remnants of aerial bombs and rockets
documented at the site, as well as satellite imagery showing impact consistent
with the use of air-delivered munitions.”
The UN
Commission’s report cited a photograph of the crumpled tailfin of a Russian
OFAB-250 bomb found under some boxes in a warehouse as evidence that it had
been used in the attack. The White Helmets took the photograph and circulated
it to the news media, including to
the Washington Post and to the
Bellingcat website, which specializes in countering Russia’s claims
about its operations in Syria.
But that
bomb could not have exploded in that spot because it would have made a crater
many times larger than the small indentation in the floor in the White Helmet
photo – as shown in this
video of a man standing in the crater of a similar bomb in Palmyra.
Something
other than an OFAB-250 bomb – such as an S-5 rocket – had caused the fine
shrapnel tears in the boxes shown in the photo, as a detail from the
larger scene reveals. So the OFAB bomb tailfin must have been placed
at the scene after the attack.
Both UN
imagery analysts and independent experts who examined the satellite images
found that the impact craters could not have come from the “aerial bombs” cited
by the Commission.
The
analysis of the satellite images by United Nations specialists at UNITAR-UNOSAT
made public
by the UN Office of Humanitarian Coordination on March 1 further contradicts
the White Helmet account, reflecting the absence of any evidence of either
“barrel bombs” or OFAB-250 bombs dropped on the site.
The UN
analysts identified four spots in the images on pages five and six of their
report as “possible impact craters.” But a UN source familiar with their
analysis of the images told me that it had ruled out the possibility that those
impact points could have been caused by either “barrel bombs” or Russian
OFAB-250 bombs.
The reason,
the UN source said, was that such bombs would have left much larger craters
than those found in the images. Those possible impact points could have been
either from much smaller air-launched munitions or from ground-based artillery
or mortar fire, but not from either of those weapons, according to the UN
source.
Expert
Challenges
A former
U.S. intelligence official with long experience in analysis of aerial photos
and Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon analyst, both of whom reviewed the
satellite images, agreed that the spots identified by UNOSAT could not have
been from either “barrel bombs” or OFAB-250 bombs.
The former
intelligence official, who demanded anonymity because he still deals with
government officials, said the small impact points identified by the UN team
reminded him of impacts from “a multiple rocket launcher or possibly a mortar.”
Sprey
agreed that all of those impact points could have been from artillery or mortar
fire but also noted that photographs of the trucks and other damaged vehicles
show no evidence that they were hit by an airstrike. The photos show only
extensive fire damage and, in the case of one car, holes of irregular size and
shape, he said, suggesting flying debris rather than bomb shrapnel.
Sprey
further pointed to photographic evidence indicating that an explosion that the
UN Commission blamed on a Syrian airstrike came from within the building
itself, not from an external blast. The building across the street from some of
the trucks destroyed by an explosion (in Figure 9
of a series of photos on the
Bellngcat website) clearly shows that the front wall of the building
was blown outward toward the road, whereas the rear wall and the roof
were still intact.
The
photograph (in Figure 10) taken from inside the remains of that same building
shows the debris from the blast was blown all the way across the street to the
damaged truck. Sprey said those pictures strongly suggest that an IED
(improvised explosive device) had been set in the house to explode toward the
trucks.
In
embracing the Syrian-air-strike narrative – although it falls apart on closer
examination – the UN“Commission of Inquiry” thus fell into line with the
dominant Western political bias in favor of the armed opposition to the Syrian
government, a prejudice that has been applied to the Syrian conflict by UN
organs since the beginning of the war in 2011.
But never
has the evidence so clearly contradicted that line as it has in this case –
even though you will not learn that by reading or watching the West’s
commercial news media.
Gareth
Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012
Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
