In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama
laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of
Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was
prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical
weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death
over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was
responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined
that it is in the national security interests of the United States to
respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted
military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat,
but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early
morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be
hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to
August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared
for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed
gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a
regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been
trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed
at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
But
in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and
consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion
anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of
intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a
colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s
responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current
regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that
the Obama administration had altered the available information – in
terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his
advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if
it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was
happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of
Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence
of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early
bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense
frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys
are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this
guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the
intelligence as they go along?”’
The complaints focus on what
Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of
the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a
highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the
Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser
and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes
no political or economic information, but provides a summary of
important military events around the world, with all available
intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that
some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through
23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of
Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with
Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command
structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about
the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August
that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of
photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on
YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the
administration knew no more than the public.
Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day
speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House
press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the
growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside
intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson
for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to
conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every
minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything
possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s
tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press
secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information –
that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible
‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t
occur’.
The absence of immediate alarm inside the American
intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about
Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least
two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched
on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have
been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA
contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published
excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence
programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with
the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim
portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than
top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with
problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting
Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic
eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted
communications among senior military officials at the outset of the
civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar
al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA
no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership
in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad,
such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since
21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific
information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
The Post
report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system
inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status
of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by
the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US
intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post
summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed
on the ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official,
who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have
been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are
designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical
warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of
early warning, is the sensors’ ability to alert US and Israeli
intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a
neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in
the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American
intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with
sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins
eroding the rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass
killer. ‘The Syrian army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a
chemical attack,’ the former senior intelligence official told me.
‘We
created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid
warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a warning over three days
because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or
you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve
gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21
August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin
had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of
warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in
Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.
The sensors had worked in the
past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the
sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a
chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian
army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all
militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an
attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was
‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic
means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of
exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If
what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president
had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the
same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’
The NSA
would of course monitor Assad’s office around the clock if it could, the
former official said. Other communications – from various army units in
combat throughout Syria – would be far less important, and not analysed
in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio
frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine
communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA
cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be
zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers. Once the
scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a
comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting
through the full archive of stored communications.
A keyword or two
would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant
conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies
started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter
that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a
high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that
Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports
that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to
justify the Iraq war.
The
White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian
government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington
journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the
national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not
invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government
assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence
community. The document laid out what was essentially a political
argument to bolster the administration’s case against the Assad
government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in
his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that
Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days before the
attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more
details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the
ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that
the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by
putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical
weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as
if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it
happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that
was widely reported at the time.
An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the
Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning.
‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the
regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who
lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail
was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about
nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people –
including more than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable
to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by
the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group
reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a
French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US
total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have
been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA
analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern
Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In
other words, it was little more than a guess.)
Five days later, a
spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said
that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was
not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently:
‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this
horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to
gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that
elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to
using chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their
story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post,
relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front
page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the
Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the
launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian
officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House
maintained control of the narrative.
So when Obama said on 10
September that his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons
personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the
statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on
communications analysed days after 21 August.
The former senior
intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went
back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama
later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons
personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s
government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the
specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of
the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical
attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and
there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used
was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible, of course,
that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis
of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from
direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.
The
press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the
use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the
attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been
controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report warned,
‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to
the arrival of the mission …
During the time spent at these locations,
individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that
such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’ Still,
the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and
British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing
up the administration’s assertions. An annex to the UN report
reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a
rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics of a 330mm calibre
artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the existence
of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was
responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been
previously documented or reported to be in possession of the
insurgency’.
Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and
national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his
colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised
munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it
was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’.
The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of
a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times,
again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path
of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin,
and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their
being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the
landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the
chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in
the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual
observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular
were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study
demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to
be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd,
published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly
assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of
sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that
analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons
experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and
range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.
The
White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and
when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could
undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the
Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist
organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide
bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside
Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the
secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the
Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined
several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another
secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed
from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and
April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted
the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four
chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign
responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that
the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees of
confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks.
Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made
headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The
unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence
community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said,
‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to
gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of
information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words,
the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government
involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press
coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress,
who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.
Two months later, a White
House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian
culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had ‘high
confidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150
deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the
press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had
ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once
again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a
report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No
specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports
identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had
confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the
nerve agent ‘does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed
or who was responsible for the dissemination’. The White House further
declared: ‘We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that
the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The
statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US
intelligence agencies.
Already by late May, the senior
intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama
administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent
alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in
Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing
sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus,
including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer
dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert
formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria
and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq
had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making
mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using
sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American
military.
On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what
had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded
to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the
consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that
the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army
had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm
previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin.
A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered – with the
help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further
reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.
Independently
of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US
troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government’s stockpile
of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential
threat. ‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military
mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official
explained. ‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to
a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the
jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that
Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from
the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We
had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and
warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel
forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because
they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on
signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and
technical capability of the rebels.’
There is evidence that during
the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by
the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s
professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July,
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy
assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public
testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and other ground
forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical
warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and
other enablers’. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy
thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian
rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create
sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a
rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a
decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences:
‘We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not
enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful
consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning
state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a
viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash
the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’
The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the
DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were
not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable
markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn
Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American
intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra
Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.
The
administration’s public affairs officials are not as concerned about
al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his public
statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s
strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no
less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said,
according to a recording of his presentation. ‘And within the
opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in
strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If left
unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he also
cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on,
‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’
Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not
allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.
*
A
series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that
members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives
about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida
fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant
who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the
crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of
defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to
the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has
sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the
influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John
Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that
al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian
opposition. He later withdrew the claim.
In both its public and
private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the
available intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and
continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of
chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret
briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the
attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive
against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than
two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away
from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had
sarin and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the
UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August,
Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference:
‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses
sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’
It
is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was
made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of
the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate
assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence
official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped
to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what
I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There
was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the
rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the
sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram
of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by
the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some
members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack
weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’
The proposed American
missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned
quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian
chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was
definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined
Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad
government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought
relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special
operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile
attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as
initially envisaged by the White House, would have been ‘like providing
close air support for al-Nusra’.)
The administration’s distortion
of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable
question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away
from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an
iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and
later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It
appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with
contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to
cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from
Republicans.
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September
by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel
forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in
Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or
transfer [chemical] weapons.’ The resolution also calls for the
immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any
‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name.
While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its
chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of
precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could
end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients
that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other
in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.
See also:
A Handful of Constitutionally-Minded People within the Pentagon Stopped the Syrian War
