Before the Syrian Army dropped bombs in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4th, an activist/journalist tweeted this in the early morning hours (h/t: Walid Shoebat):
https://twitter.com/feraskaram01/status/849050540323594240
According to Google Translate, it reads:
“Tomorrow, a media campaign will be launched to cover the intensity of the air raids on the countryside of Hama and the use of chlorine against civilians.”
This was tweeted a little after 3am in the morning of the 4th before the attack.
According to CNN, the attack happened just before 7:30am in the morning there:
A doctor in a hospital close to Khan Sheikhoun told CNN: “Today around 7:30 a.m., about 125 … arrived to our hospital. Twenty-five of them were already dead, 70% to 80% of the wounded people were kids and women.
So some three to four hours before the attack occurred, this activist/journalist was already preparing a media campaign to expose Assad’s use of chemical weapons?
Not to mention, there is a weapons manufacturing facility there in Khan Sheikhoun that was captured in this video by Qatari TV which aired on Al Jazeera. The video begins by showing people being washed off after the chemical attack, but then shows the facility nearby where they are manufacturing weapons:
RT reports that Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov stated that there were chemical weapons being made and stored there:
The Syrian Air Force has destroyed a warehouse in Idlib province where chemical weapons were being produced and stockpiled before being shipped to Iraq, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman said.
The strike, which was launched midday Tuesday, targeted a major rebel ammunition depot east of the town of Khan Sheikhoun, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.
The warehouse was used to both produce and store shells containing toxic gas, Konashenkov said. The shells were delivered to Iraq and repeatedly used there, he added, pointing out that both Iraq and international organizations have confirmed the use of such weapons by militants.
The LA Times has mixed reporting on the facility, but one journalist they talked to suggests it was definitely used to store weapons:
A number of opposition activists in Khan Sheikhoun said their groups had had no rebel weapons facilities, though the town has long been a target of government warplanes.
Syrian journalist Nizar Nayouf quoted an unnamed doctor who told him there had been a storage area for the rebels in town.
“It contained a workshop … a section to store weapons and ammunition, and even foodstuffs and medical as well as logistical equipment,” said Nayouf in a message on social media Wednesday.
Another activist, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said in a WhatsApp voice recording Wednesday that a bakery in the eastern part of town had been repurposed as a weapons storage area.
But Khaled Ibrahim, a pro-opposition activist, said in an interview that the bakery had been destroyed a year and a half ago in a strike and was unusable.
So what happened here? Honesty I don’t know because all of this is circumstantial evidence. But between the tweet and the existence of this weapons facility that may have been storing gas, it seems possible that the Assad regime could have been set up by people who are worried that Assad will win complete victory.
After all, the LA Times makes an interesting point about the narrative that Assad would use chemical weapons on these people after making such victories lately:
Why would Assad attack now?
Moallem insisted “it is not reasonable that the Syrian army could use chemical weapons now at the time when it has been achieving victories on various fronts.”
Militarily, the government has achieved significant gains, while its rebel adversaries are largely in disarray. It has taken back the cities of Aleppo and Homs, and was on the cusp of negotiating issues of aid and reconstruction with world powers under the aegis of the U.N.
Why would it put all of that in jeopardy with a gas attack like this on innocent civilians and ‘little babies’?
As I suggested, I don’t know what happened. But the US government seems awfully sure of itself that Assad really did this himself, as we saw with the attack last night on Assad’s airbase.
But they were also awfully sure back in 2013 when even McClatchy reported that it was unlikely that the Assad regime had done it.
There are many forces that are against Assad, forces that have been funding the jihadi rebels to keep this civil war going for six years now. And now that Assad has been winning for some time, especially with Russian help, I think it’s quite plausible that desperate activists/rebels in the region planned to use chemical weapons the next time they saw Assad dropping bombs. That would give them what they needed to start a media campaign to get the world against Assad to help defeat him.
And if that’s the case, then Trump and the US government just got dupped.