Originally published Nov 10, 2017

Robert Parry’s new essay on Consortium News responds to the UN/OPCW joint report which concluded that Assad’s forces were responsible for the gassing incident, allegedly involving sarin, that occurred in Khan Seikhoun on the morning of April 4th of this year.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/09/did-al-qaeda-dupe-trump-on-syrian-...

Parry emphasizes the findings of Annex II of this report, which note that about 100 victims of this attack were delivered to hospitals prior to the time of the alleged bombing:

A new United Nations-sponsored report on the April 4 sarin incident in an Al Qaeda-controlled town in Syria blames Bashar al-Assad’s government for the atrocity, but the report contains evidence deep inside its “Annex II” If you read that far, you would find that more than 100 victims of sarin exposure were taken to several area hospitals before the alleged Syrian warplane could have struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun. Still, the Joint Investigative Mechanism [JIM], a joint project of the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW], brushed aside this startling evidence and delivered the Assad guilty verdict that the United States and its allies wanted. The JIM consigned the evidence of a staged atrocity, in which Al Qaeda operatives would have used sarin to kill innocent civilians and pin the blame on Assad, to a spot 14 pages into the report’s Annex II. The sensitivity of this evidence of a staged “attack” is heightened by the fact that President Trump rushed to judgment and ordered a “retaliatory” strike with 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase on the night of April 6–7. That U.S. attack reportedly killed several soldiers at the base and nine civilians, including four children, in nearby neighborhoods. So, if it becomes clear that Al Qaeda tricked President Trump not only would he be responsible for violating international law and killing innocent people, but he and virtually the entire Western political establishment along with the major news media would look like Al Qaeda’s “useful idiots.”

These new findings align perfectly with claims that the gassing victims filmed by the White Helmets had been the civilians kidnapped by Al Qaeda shortly before in the towns of Khattab and Majdal, which previously had been under government control. Here are reports that were posted at the time (4/14):

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/jihadist-rebels-kidnap-civilians-fl...

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/jumping-conclusions-something-not-a...

An excerpt:

It is known that about 250 people from Majdal and Khattab were kidnapped by Al-Qaeda terrorists last week. Local sources have claimed that many of those dead from the chemical weapons were those from Majdal and Khattab.

And a later comment under one of these articles by “RMP”:

These people who were kidnapped are the same ones who appear on the jihadist rebel videos dying from Sarin gas. They drove them to Khan Sheikhoun, poisoned them and then filmed them as they were dying, all the while blaming Assad for the Sarin attacks.

In light of current evidence, this sounds like a highly credible interpretation to me.

Unfortunately for the jihadis, they didn’t seem to synchronize their watches properly, and hence delivered many of their victims to hospitals prematurely. Nonetheless, JIM didn’t allow this or other glaring inconsistencies to deter them from delivering the required verdict.

I don’t imagine the JIM report even mentioned these kidnappings, or attempted to interview the relatives of the kidnapping victims?

In any case, congratulations to the US and their JIM puppets for covering up what appears to be one of the most grotesque atrocities of recent times.

The assertion that Assad was responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun gassing is virtually imbecilic on its face, given the facts that international inspectors had been satisfied that the Syrian government’s sarin inventories had been destroyed, that Assad was then winning the war, that gassing several dozen civilians would not have aided his war effort one bit, and that the only thing that could have prevented his impending victory was international outrage over chemical weapons atrocities. Only a self-destructive, insane sociopath would have ordered chemical weapons use under these circumstances. Regardless of how one may feel about Syria’s conduct of the war, Assad is neither insane nor self-destructive, and he has in fact accomplished a rather remarkable feat in seeing his country through years of unrelenting vicious attacks by jihadi invaders (laughably referred to by our MSM as “rebels”) funded and armed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the CIA.

Parry is just one of a number of prominent analysts and journalists who have poked gaping holes in the MSM/Deep State narrative regarding Khan Sheikhoun:

https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/document_part/asset/1884812/z...

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/07/nyts-new-syria-sarin-report-challe...

https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/what-really-happened-khan-shei...

https://www.sott.net/article/354651-Seymour-Hersh-There-Was-No-Chemical-...

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/27/hershs-new-syria-revelations-bur...

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/04/the-trumped-up-syria-sarin-case/