How Did Bashar Al-Assad Get Away With the Ghouta Chemical Attack?: The Promise of Relinquishing Syria's Chemical Weapons Arsenal That Was Never Fully Fulfilled

Introduction

Over the years, discussing the Syrian conflict, naming its main protagonists, and grasping their main motivations have become one of the first imperatives of diplomatic savoir-vivre, for this conflict teaches us a great deal about the complexity of Syria, the region, and the way the international community has acted in response to various developments in this theater of war. Ignorance of what has happened in Syria since 2011 is no longer an option. After unsuccessful negotiations between opposition leaders and the Syrian government at the beginning of that year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided to use disproportional force against peaceful demonstrators.

By the middle of 2012, the situation in Syria had further deteriorated with third parties joining the conflict, such as al Qaeda-linked affiliates from the al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, which have tried to use the situation in this country to pursue their own political goals and objectives that were inconsistent with the goals and objectives of those who started the Syrian uprising in the first place.

Subsequently, over the next decade of fighting, the situation in the country has deteriorated as it quickly started bearing a resemblance to the hostile environment of Italian city-states and principalities before the 19^th century Risorgimento. Under these conditions, Syria became a place of war of everyone against everyone (Bellum omnium contra omnes). President Assad “turned to Nicolo Machiavelli” for advice. The jihadists from al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS) can be comparable to Pope Alexander VI and Giuseppe Borgia. They shared a vision of expanding the areas under their sway into powerful ecclesiastical states and a “fundamentalist melting pot” (Chappell, 2014; Prendergast, 2019, 3-36), that would have dominated the region. At the same time, the moderate commanders from rebel groups and battalions fighting under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army were reduced to the status of disunited feuding Italian heads of families that could hold substantial political power if they learned how to work together, but their lack of ability to cooperate consigned them to the position of political pawns positioned in disadvantageous squares between the pieces that do not matter on the larger chessboard of regional politics.

The Ghouta Chemical attack happened precisely at the beginning of this chaotic period in Syrian history, on 21 August 2013, more than two years into the uprising. On that day, Syria and the entire international community witnessed one of the deadliest chemical weapons attacks in recent history (Since the end of World War II, chemical weapons have reportedly been used in only a few cases, notably by Iraq in the 1980s against Iran), and one of the most blatant examples of intentional human rights abuses orchestrated during the Syrian conflict (2011-present). This date signifies the beginning of the end of the Arab Spring in Syria and the beginning of the new phase that led the actors involved in the local theater of war to a slippery slope of a civil war in Syria.

This deadly chemical assault should be seen as one of the most important events that defined the way the international community (IC) has dealt with the Syrian Arab Spring, for, according to several influential accounts, the magnitude of this attack clearly transcended the inviolability of the nation-state. Yet, despite gathering compelling prima facie evidence that this attack was linked to Bashar al-Assad’s loyalists, the expected full-blown military retaliation against his regime did not take place in the manner that international commentators might have expected. The Syrian regime did not face any severe consequences for its actions, except for being exposed to the discomfort of temporary international sanctions that obliged the regime to relinquish its chemical weapons arsenal under international supervision.

We know today that despite the promised full cooperation from Syrian officials, the mandate to relinquish all illegal weapons of mass destruction was fulfilled only to a limited extent. The main goal of this chapter is to scrutinize the nature of the policy-making mistakes committed during the negotiating process between American, Russian, and Syrian officials to equip future decision-makers with better policy-making suggestions to deal with similar challenges in the future in a more effective manner.