Pentagon Still Believes Assad Has Control of Syria's Chemical Arsenal

The Pentagon says it doesn't have evidence linking the Syrian regime to the recent sarin gas attack. But it also says it believes dictator Bashar Assad still has control of his deadly chem arsenal.
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Workers for the Army's Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana perform checks in an area of the facility where chemical agents may be present, in an undated photo.Photo: U.S. Army

There's still no hard evidence about who caused the recent, deadly sarin gas attack in Syria. But the Pentagon's "strong view at this point" is that dictator Bashar Assad maintains control of his chemical arsenal.

Pentagon spokesman George Little wouldn't go into any specifics about the basis for that viewpoint, citing classified information. But Little said today that his "very strong belief" is that "if chemical weapons were used, it likely would have been used at the behest of the Syrian regime." President Obama has said that use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" in terms of U.S. intervention in the conflict, though an actual U.S. response has yet to be determined.

Little was echoing comments made Thursday by his boss, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and the British defense chief that Assad still has control of the hundreds of metric tons of chemical weapons and their precursors in Syria. All that was occasioned by the White House's acknowledgement on April 25 that as-yet-unknown parties used sarin gas in the bloody, two-year old conflict.

Except over the weekend, a member of the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Carla Del Ponte, said that the chemical attack might have actually come from the Syrian rebels, not Assad. Del Ponte told a Swiss television station that she had "strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof" that the rebels used sarin, based on victims' testimony. This morning, however, the U.N. released a clarification that her inquiry "has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict."

Little read the U.N. clarification during a morning Pentagon briefing for reporters, and declined to follow up on it. "The United Nations is still continuing, as are we and other partners, to determine precisely what has happened in Syria with respect to chemical weapons," Little said.

The stakes are high for determining the so-called "chain of custody" for the sarin attacks. The Obama administration is under immense political pressure to intervene militarily in the conflict -- at the very least, giving advanced military weaponry to the rebels. Experts doubt that arming the rebels can tip the balance in a civil war that has killed an estimated 70,000, absent U.S. air power. One of the premiere advocates of U.S. military involvement in the conflict, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said over the weekend that reports of Israeli air strike on Iranian missiles bound from Syria to Lebanese Hezbollah pointed to the need for a "game-changing action" on Obama's part.

Yet the Obama administration is reluctant to draw itself deeper in a third war in a Muslim country in a decade. Administration officials have emphasized the need for conclusive evidence linking Assad to the chemical attack before contemplating taking military action. Little refused to comment on the apparent Israeli strikes, but reiterated the Pentagon's bottom line on culpability for chemical attacks.

"It's our very strong belief, based on what we know at this stage," Little said, citing no specific evidence, "that if chemical weapons were used that the Syrian regime would be responsible."