The president’s army is battle-weary, but the sarin attack and the US missile strikes show this war is far from over

April seemed to start well for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, six years in to a civil war he once looked unlikely to survive.



Fighting still raged across the battered country but his army and the collection of militias and foreign militaries backing his government had the upper hand, and the White House appeared to have taken any push for regime change off the table.

Then, on Tuesday, the Syrian air force bombed Khan Sheikhun town, killing dozens of people with the nerve agent sarin. Two days later the US president, Donald Trump, authorised missile strikes on the Syrian airbase where he said chemical weapons had been loaded.

Critics of the strikes have raced to attack the US for blaming Assad, dismissing physical evidence against him and arguing that it would be irrational for the Syrian leader to use chemical weapons.

Russia and Syria have claimed the sarin came from rebel stockpiles hit accidentally by government bombs, an argument dismissed by chemical weapons experts and inconsistent with evidence at the site of the attack.

'The dead were wherever you looked': inside Syrian town after chemical attack Read more

“Assad is not mad and would have known that when Donald Trump produced an olive branch in his direction [then] any use of chemical weapons would have been counter-productive,” said Peter Ford, a former British ambassador to Syria.

But Assad’s military gains since 2015 have been slow and costly. His army is battle-weary and although they have won decisive battles, the war is far from over.

Joshua Landis, a long-time Syria observer and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said chemical weapons could be attractive to a leader running low on military alternatives.

“I think Assad and his generals want to win and have a depleted and exhausted army,” Joshua Landis said, when asked on Twitter if he thought the Syrian leader would have used chemical weapons.

“Using atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima helped the US to win [the second world war]. Neither city had military value. Demonstration effect. Shock and awe?”

The images of the sarin victims, many of them children, are disturbing. But over the course of the long war Assad’s government has shown little compunction about civilian suffering and death.

There have been atrocities documented by all parties in the conflict, but Assad is responsible for the majority of civilian deaths. And from the chemical weapons attack of 2013 to the bombing of hospitals in Aleppo last year, Syria has repeatedly broken international laws protecting non-combatants.

As early as 2013, UN officials said the Syrian leader was implicated in war crimes. Survivors and defectors have documented a gruesome archipelago of torture and murder chambers in jails and hospitals under the control of Damascus.

Assad has also bombed and starved civilians in rebel-held areas for years. It was a brutal wager, which until this week paid off, that Russian support and western fear of intervention would protect him from anything more damaging than censure and outrage.

Turning to sarin was an escalation in brutality, but the Syrian president may have felt more confident after the White House described his rule as “a political reality we have to accept”.

That could have made Assad believe the risk of retaliation for a major chemical weapons attack was falling, at a time when he had clear incentives to use “terror tactics”, said Shashank Joshi, senior fellow at the Rusi thinktank.

“Don’t confuse Assad’s national and strategic success for military supremacy everywhere. He’s struggling in many places, locally, and this in itself can prompt use of terror tactics. His army is in bad shape,” Joshi said.

“The use [of chemical weapons] itself is not in any way surprising, given that he did it in 2013 and, on a lower scale, many times since. The issue that we are grappling with is scale and timing [of the attack].”

Since the 2013 sarin attack on a Damascus suburb, there have been government attacks using chlorine gas which have brought almost no repercussions. Sarin is much deadlier, and its use easier to prove through testing, making it a more powerful but riskier form of chemical weapon.

In rebel-held parts of Syria, the attack was met with relief that it might mark an end to chemical attacks, but little hope that it would bring an end to death or suffering.

“I am reading now that this strike is to make Assad not use chemical weapons any more,” said activist Abdulkafi al Hamdo.

The message from that, he said, was that the government could “go ahead with using barrel bombs, vacuum rockets, cluster bombs, phosphorus weapons and any kind, just not chemical weapons”.