The country's air force hit a militant warehouse in the city of Khan Shaykhun. According to intelligence services, chemical weapons were produced there. Bombs filled with poisonous substances. Perhaps, they were the ones used the day before during the bombing of the city. As a result of that attack, 70 people were killed and at least a hundred were injured. Western media hastened to blame Russia and Syria for this attack. However, as it turned out, it doesn't go together with the facts. Matvei Popov will tell why.
The day before, almost none of the Western media resisted the temptation to blame the Syrian troops and the Russian Air Force for the tragedy in Idlib province, where many people died, poisoned with nerve gas. An important detail is that the first ones to arrive on site were the infamous "White Helmets," which pose in front of cameras much better than actually save people. Apparently, it was after talking with them that the Reuters agency hastened to blame Moscow for the monstrous brutality. Later, it became known that, first of all, the Russian aviation wasn't used there that day.
Second, the toxic warfare agent was produced by the militants themselves. Syrian aviation hit a large ammunition depot belonging to the terrorists, and a build-up of military equipment, in the eastern outskirts of the Khan Shaykhun settlement. On the territory of this warehouse, there were workshops where bombs filled with poisonous substances were produced. The militants themselves, by the way, never concealed the fact that they possessed the skills, equipment, and sufficient quantities of raw materials to produce chemical weapons.
Moreover, they proudly upload videos on the Internet, where they first hold excursions to their laboratories, and then shoot bombs with a deadly payload at peaceful neighborhoods of a particular city. It’s useless to use chemical weapons against the regular army. In most of the cases, soldiers have gas masks. Therefore, militants prefer civilians as targets. And the bodies of the dead can then be presented as alleged victims of the regime. This happened the day before, when, as a result of an attack by the radicals, more than 70 people were killed and at least a hundred were injured. One more fact is that it was Idlib where the militants produced chemical weapons that were supplied to ISIS controlled territory.
The ISIS group is forbidden in Russia. From this huge arsenal, chemical weapons were supplied to Iraqi territory by militants. The fact that terrorists used them has been proven many times both by the international organizations and the official authorities of the country. Those poisonous weapons were also used by the militants in the Syrian Aleppo. Their use was detected by the Russian military experts at the end of last year.
New arsenals of crudely produced chemical weapons are found all the time in Iraqi Mosul. This shows the production scale. Moreover, Islamists abandon warehouses with the forbidden weapons so easily that it seems that they have bigger warehouses somewhere else. It’s not the first time that the militants have committed a crime, and blamed it on Moscow and Damascus. It was just last September, that the UN and the Red Crescent humanitarian convoy, which was going to Aleppo, was completely destroyed. Russian and Syrian government troops were immediately blamed for the attack. And only the investigation conducted by Syria's international support group proved that the whole story was just a well-prepared show.
