Russia and the West Spar Over U.N. Report, Despite Evidence Pointing to Syrian Regime

Russia and the West Spar Over U.N. Report, Despite Evidence Pointing to Syrian Regime

The Cable: 16 Sep 2013

The long-awaited United Nations report on the deadly Aug. 21 attack in the suburbs of Damascus does not directly blame either the Syrian government or the Syrian opposition, but the scrupulous level of detail in the report provides new evidence pointing to a military-orchestrated assault rather than a rebel-executed chemical weapons attack. In particular, analysts speaking with Foreign Policy latched onto the report's conclusions regarding the quantities of toxic gas in the attack, the type of rockets used, and the trajectory of the missile vectors.