The head of the U.N. team that investigated the Aug. 21, 2013 Sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, Ake Sellstrom, is doubtful about the number of victims of the attack reported immediately after the event.
Sellstrom has suggested that many people who claimed to have been seriously affected by Sarin merely imagined that they had suffered significant exposure to the chemical.
Underlying Sellstrom’s doubts are data on symptoms from a sample of people who said they were severely affected by the Sarin attack. The data, published in the September report, appear to belie the claims of Sarin intoxication by those in the sample, according to experts who have analysed them.
سیلسٹروم نے ایک میں اپنے شکوک کا اظہار کیا۔ Gwyn Winfield کے ساتھ انٹرویو, the editor of the CBRNe World Magazine, that was published in the February issue.
“If you take the figures from Tokyo, you can compare how many died versus those that were intoxicated,” said Sellstrom. But in the case of Syrian attack, he said, “[W]hile we could conclude that it was big, we couldn’t do the same for how many died or were affected.”
انہوں نے شک کا اظہار کیا کہ حملے میں بچ جانے والے مبینہ طور پر بہت سے سرین کے سامنے آچکے ہیں۔ سیلسٹروم نے کہا، "آپ کو جنگ میں دیگر اشیاء سے بہت سی علامات مل سکتی ہیں،" [P] ہاسفورس دھواں، آنسو گیس، میدان جنگ میں ان میں سے بہت سے آلات پھیپھڑوں، آنکھوں کو متاثر کریں گے اور آپ کو سانس کے مسائل پیدا کریں گے۔"
پھر سیلسٹروم نے مزید کہا، "جنگ کے کسی بھی تھیٹر میں بھی، لوگ دعویٰ کریں گے کہ وہ نشے میں ہیں۔ ہم نے اسے فلسطین، افغانستان اور ہر جگہ دیکھا۔
Now a project manager at the European CBRNE Centre in Umea, Sellstrom did not respond to e-mail requests from IPS for comment on this article by deadline.
However, his remarks to CBRNe were evidently influenced strongly by the team’s experience in gathering data on several dozen alleged victims who claimed to have been among the most heavily exposed to Sarin on Aug. 21.
Sellstrom explained to Winfield that the investigating team had sought the help of the opposition in the area where the attack took place to identify as many as 80 survivors of the Sarin attack.
“We thought that if they can gather 80 people who were affected but still surviving, that it [would be] clearly indicative that a major event had taken place,” he said.
Sellstrom revealed in the interview that the team had chosen 36 people from the original 80 identified as survivors by the opposition. Those 36 people described themselves as having had very serious exposure to Sarin.
Thirty of the 36 reported rocket strikes either on or near their homes. The remaining six said they had gone to a point of impact to help those suffering from the attack.
اقوام متحدہ کی رپورٹ میں 36 افراد کی رپورٹ کردہ علامات کے تفصیلی اعدادوشمار فراہم کیے گئے ہیں اور یہ نتیجہ اخذ کیا گیا ہے کہ اعداد و شمار "آرگن فاسفیٹ نشہ کے ساتھ مطابقت رکھتے ہیں"۔ لیکن کیمیائی ہتھیاروں کے ماہرین نے اعداد و شمار میں سنگین تضادات کی نشاندہی کی ہے جو اس کے برعکس ظاہر کرتے ہیں۔
Twenty-eight of the 36 victims – nearly four-fifths of the sample – said they had experienced loss of consciousness, according to the Sep. 16 U.N. report. The second most frequent symptom was difficulty breathing, which was reported by 22 of the 36, followed by blurred vision, which was suffered by 15 of them. But only five of the 36 reported miosis, or constricted pupils.
That fact is an indication that the exposure to Sarin was actually minimal or nonexistent for 31 of the 36, or 86 percent of the sample. Miosis is the most basic and reliable indicator of nerve gas poisoning, according to chemical weapons literature and specialists who analysed the report.
As little as four mg of Sarin per cubic metre for just two minutes would have triggered that physiological response, according to an Apr. 17 email from UK-based American chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta in April. A 2002 article in the journal Critical Care Medicine put the minimum exposure necessary to cause miosis at one mg of Sarin per cubic metre for three minutes.
Yet miosis was the least prevalent symptom among those people claiming to have been very seriously exposed to Sarin in Syria.
Dr. Abbas Faroutan, an Iranian physician who treated Iranian victims of Iraqi nerve gas attacks, noted that the data were “not logical”.
Seven of the 36 people identified as victims told investigators they had lost a combined total of 39 members of their immediate families who were killed in buildings they said were either points of impact of the rockets or only 20 metres (64 feet) away. However, only one of the seven exhibited the constriction of pupils and only one reported nausea and vomiting.
Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.
That seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that even exposure to an amount of Sarin too small to cause any symptoms would be detected in the blood using an extremely sensitive method called fluoride reactivation, according to Kaszeta.
The U.N. team found that six of the people who claimed serious exposure to Sarin had no trace of Sarin in their blood at all, indicating that they had in fact experienced no exposure to Sarin at all.
Kaszeta said he had concluded that the people interviewed and evaluated by the UN “didn’t have serious exposure” to nerve gas.
اس بات کا اشارہ کہ نمونے میں بھاری اکثریت کا سارن سے بہت کم یا کوئی رابطہ نہیں تھا، خاص طور پر اہم تھا، کیونکہ نمونے میں شامل لوگوں کو مقامی اپوزیشن حکام نے سب سے زیادہ سنگین متاثرہ زندہ بچ جانے والوں میں سے منتخب کیا تھا۔ اعداد و شمار بتاتے ہیں کہ شامی اپوزیشن اور اس کے بیرونی حامیوں نے حملے کے دائرہ کار اور شدت کو بڑھا چڑھا کر پیش کیا تھا۔
36 مبینہ زندہ بچ جانے والوں پر جمع کی گئی علامات کے بارے میں قابل اعتراض اعداد و شمار کے بظاہر حوالہ میں، سیلسٹروم نے ون فیلڈ کو بتایا کہ تفتیش کاروں کو "نشہ کی تفریق تشخیص میں بہتر ہونے کی ضرورت ہے، بہتر طبی مارکر۔"
سیلسٹروم نے متاثرین کی تعداد کے بارے میں بھی شکوک کا اظہار کیا جن کے بارے میں کہا جاتا ہے کہ مقامی ہسپتالوں میں ان کا علاج کیا گیا ہے۔ اقوام متحدہ کے تفتیش کاروں نے دمشق کے مضافات میں تین میں سے دو ہسپتالوں کا دورہ کیا جہاں حملے کے متاثرین کا علاج کیا گیا تھا اور انہوں نے ان متاثرین کی تعداد کے اعداد و شمار فراہم کیے تھے جن کا انہوں نے علاج کیا تھا۔
سیلسٹروم نے کہا کہ "[T]وہ اعداد و شمار جو انہوں نے ان لوگوں کے بارے میں فراہم کیے تھے جو ان سے گزرے تھے وہ ممکن نہیں تھے۔" "یہ ناممکن ہے کہ وہ ان لوگوں کی تعداد کو تبدیل کر سکتے جن کا وہ دعوی کرتے ہیں کہ انہوں نے کیا ہے۔"
Sellstrom did not refer to the total number of victims claimed by hospital administrators, but Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) issued a statement Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the area of the attack had reported to MSF that they “received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013”. MSF said 355 had died.
Sellstrom repeated his doubts about the total number of victims of Sarin intoxication and the numbers of patients said to have been treated in hospitals in a Mar. 11 انٹرویو بین الاقوامی امن کے لیے کارنیگی انڈومنٹ سے وابستہ ویب سائٹ "سیریا ان کرائسز" کے ساتھ۔
شام کی تحقیقات کے سربراہ نے اقوام متحدہ کے لیے ایران عراق جنگ کے دوران عراق کی جانب سے کیمیائی ہتھیاروں کے استعمال کی بھی تحقیقات کی تھیں، وہ یو این ایس سی او ایم کے چیف انسپکٹر، عراق کی جانب سے بڑے پیمانے پر تباہی پھیلانے والے ہتھیاروں پر پابندی کی تعمیل کے لیے اقوام متحدہ کے کمیشن کے سربراہ رہ چکے ہیں۔ اس کے جانشین، UNMOVIC کا۔
He has apparently questioned the larger narrative of Syrian government culpability for the attack as well. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the release of the December U.N. investigation report, Sellstrom said he believes both sides in the Syrian conflict had the “opportunity” and the “capability” to “carry out chemical weapons attacks.”
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “تیار کردہ بحران: ایران جوہری خوف کی ان کہی کہانی”, was published Feb. 14.
ZNetwork کو مکمل طور پر اس کے قارئین کی سخاوت کے ذریعے مالی اعانت فراہم کی جاتی ہے۔
عطیہ کیجیئے