UN report offers clues on who carried out attack

How close does the UN report come to proving that the Assad regime was responsible for the August 21 attacks in eastern Damascus?

Munitions

The rocket systems identified by the UN as used in the attack are truck-launched 330mm rockets with around 50 to 60 litres of sarin. They are also 140mm Soviet-produced rockets carrying a smaller sarin-filled warhead. According to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, the pressure group, "both are known to be in the arsenal of the Syrian armed forces. They have never been seen in rebel hands."

According to Eliot Higgins of the Brown Moses blog which carefully tracks weapons use in the Syrian civil war: "In the 18 months I've been studying the arms and munitions in the conflict, I have never seen either type of munition used by the opposition."

According to Ake Sellstrom, the head of the UN investigating mission, these weapons were professionally made. Diplomats believe they therefore bear none of the characteristics of improvised weapons that might have been made by the opposition.

Chemicals

Chemical weapons were used on "a large scale", says the UN. The inspectors do not assess total quantity but the amount of sarin used in the attack must amount to hundreds of kilograms, according to Human Rights Watch's calculations, indicating government responsibility for the attack. "Opposition forces have never been known to be in possession of such significant amounts of sarin," HRW says.

Nature of attack

The UN says the attacks took place at two sites 16 kilometres apart, and involved incoming rockets, not on-the-ground explosions. "This was no cottage-industry use of chemical weapons," said Sir Mark Lyall Grant, UK ambassador to the UN, commenting on the report. Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the US's Monterey Institute of International Studies, told Reuters that the August 21 attack in the Ghouta region bore "so many hallmarks of a military trained in chemical warfare doctrine" and not an untrained force.

Trajectory of missiles

Calculations from the UN inspectors provide azimuth information for two of the rockets, which indicate the attack was fired from the northwest and therefore came from government controlled-areas.

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