Syria conflict: 'Chemical attacks kill hundreds'

[DetCord]

This latest attack was defiantly NOT a chemical weapon. It has all of the telltale signs of a WP or white phosphorus munition, likely a artillery round with a VT bursting fuze. I wish this administration and the media would stop putting more fuel in Obama's war machine. It's getting old.


Example:

[Skybird]

On Israel, Hezbollah is actively fighting in Syria, while other militias from Lebanon also are fighting there, but on the rebel side. I expect any result for or against one of the two sides in Syria causinf conflict in Lebanon where Hezbollah alraey is in de facto command. Iran is ally of Hezbollah and Assad. Turkey has turned into abitter enemy of Assad, making him responsible flr the refugee mess in Turkey, a Turkish provoked incident kr two, and realising that the rebelas are more in line with the AKP'S fundamentalist agenda for the Osmanic middle east 2.0 .
So it is complicated and the chance that Israel faces getting drawn jnto the turmoil, absolutely is real, and nkt even unlikely.

That Egypt has turned towards becoming less fundamentalist and more under military control again, must be a great relief for them, and ckmes nkt kne month too early. Israel has had good relations to Mubarak, there was military cooperation on the Palestinian terrorism and Sinai security concerns, and Mubarak, corrupt but stable, kept religious hotheads in check with iron fists.

So on Israel, their position is exposed, very uncomfortable, and they have all reasons to be concerned. The Palestinians recently hailed the murderers that were released by Israel, and have already called off the first round of these hopelessly optimistically socalled peace talks.

I do not envy the Israelis. They really have both hands full.

[Skybird]

[QUOTE=DetCord;2107979]This latest attack was defiantly NOT a chemical weapon. It has all of the telltale signs of a WP or white phosphorus munition, likely a artillery round with a VT bursting fuze.

I wish this administration and the media would stop putting more fuel in Obama's war machine. It's getting old.



White phosphorus in an urban environment.

According to Tchocky so much more civilised than gassing. He obviously never has seen how it works on human flesh, and burns jnto the body with people going insane in pain. If you survive, the scars and mutilations are terrible.

In the Baltic, on Ruegen and on some German beaches, people get injured until today from wp that get awashed on the shore and looks like Bernstein. 1.5 million tonnes of wwii ammo are lying close to the beaches, in the sea. The moment the stuff gets out of the water, it starts burning again, injuring collectors and tourists.

Almost like mines.

[vienna]

This latest attack was defiantly NOT a chemical weapon. It has all of the telltale signs of a WP or white phosphorus munition, likely a artillery round with a VT bursting fuze.

I wish this administration and the media would stop putting more fuel in Obama's war machine. It's getting old.

Unless I am greatly mistaken, WP is classified internationally as a chemical weapon and has been so formally classed for over two decades and informally for a lot longer. I also recall WP is part of a group of chemical weapons scheduled to be fully banned and destroyed by pending international treaties. Has anything changed in recent time?...

[Oberon]

Not just Germany, UK too, we get the odd phos bomb on the beach, usually you notice when the smoke starts coming out from the stones.

[eddie]

The BBC reports a bomb dropped on a school yard today. Seems it was WP! Kids with nasty burns, and shaking like a leaf! Really sad.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-23892594

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by vienna

Unless I am greatly mistaken, WP is classified internationally as a chemical weapon and has been so formally classed for over two decades and informally for a lot longer. I also recall WP is part of a group of chemical weapons scheduled to be fully banned and destroyed by pending international treaties. Has anything changed in recent time?...

The status of White Phosphorous weapons is a complex one. The treaties and agreements play word games depending on the intended use of WP.

If it is used in such a way that the intended effect is as a screening/smoke agent, it is not considered a chemical weapon even though it may directly cause human causalities.

If it is used in such a way that the intent is to use the phosphorous itself as the primary agent to cause human causalities, then it is considered a chemical agent under many circumstances.

A moment's reflection should reveal some convenient loopholes.

This is why nations only use WP as a screening agent and not as an anti-personal weapon. If people just happen to be burned alive by the WP, that is an Unintended Effect and is not considered a chemical attack.

Setting fire to people while playing word games -- a long tradition.

So, treaty wise, WP's relationship to chemical weapons or non-chemical weapons is that WP is a little bit of both but not enough of neither.

[vienna]

I am getting the impression some people think of chemical weapons as being only gases. Actually, a chemical weapon is any weapon that uses chemicals rather than explosives as its primary means of "doing damage". Most are gases, but some make use of chemical properties, like phosphorus, to achieve the goal of inflicting caualties or damage...

<O>

[DetCord]

Originally Posted by vienna

Unless I am greatly mistaken, WP is classified internationally as a chemical weapon and has been so formally classed for over two decades and informally for a lot longer. I also recall WP is part of a group of chemical weapons scheduled to be fully banned and destroyed by pending international treaties. Has anything changed in recent time?...

It's classified as a conventional weapon, specifically a bursting incendiary. However, it's use as a offensive weapon is outlawed by international law, and can only be used as ILLUM or Smoke.

I saw it used numerous times in Iraq by U.S. Forces and by the French in Afghanistan via artillery as a offensive weapon. They were fond of calling it a 'Killer Junior'.

[Platapus]

It will be interesting seeing the US condemning Syria for using WP by claiming it is a chemical weapons, while turning a blind eye toward Israel when Israel used WP weapons in Gaza in 2008/2009

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2009/03/25/rain-fire

Text of the Chemical Weapons Convention can be found here. In it are all the confusing definitions

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_04/cwctext

Syria has not signed nor ratified the CWC. Five countries total have not signed the CWC. Angola, Egypt, North Korea, South Sudan, and Syria

Israel has signed but not ratified the CWC. Only Israel and Myanmar have signed but not ratified the CWC

Kinda makes it a bit rough to hold Syria or Israel accountable to a treaty they did not sign/ratify.

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by DetCord

This latest attack was defiantly NOT a chemical weapon.

O'really?

Source?

WHICH attack are you referring to? The school yard one?
If so, then yes, it wasn't. It seems.

Pictures aren't evidence.

And considering the Weapons Inspectors haven't even delivered their preliminary report to the council yet, unless of course you are privy to the findings already.

And fueling the Obama war machine?

More like fueling Skybird.

[darkone999]

Let the EU deal with it.Even better the Arab League of nations.As an American I get tired of our nation being the goat and packing the burden of the worlds issues all the time.On another thought I think other nations get sick of us messing around in the affairs of other countries all the time."if you can not understand our silence then you could never understand our words"..Hope we just stay out of it.....

Peace

[Packlife]

WOW somebody on here actually said that Assad is a democratically elected president an not a dictator That made my day, while he is the President of Syria he was not elected. The Assad family has been ruling Syria for decades the first was Hafez Assad, Bashar's father, who ruled for over 3 decades. Hafez was responsible for bringing Syria into a more modern society, but just like his son's he didnt put up w/ any type of uprisings. In February 1982 after a unit of the SAA (SyrianArabArmy) was ambushed my Muslim brotherhood guerrilla's in the city of Hama which lead to an uprising in Hama. Hafez sent his younger brother Rifaat who was a commander of the special forces to take the rebels out. To make a long story short it became known as the Hama Massacre, Hama was shelled an hit from the air for weeks an rolled on w/ armor. Rifaat believed rebels were hiding in tunnels so he had them flooded w/ diesel fuel an set on fire w/ tanks waiting outside the entrances to kill who ever tried to escape (nice family eh?). It's believed all the rebels were killed an then the local population suffered the worse the death's range from 10,000-30,000, mostly in the form of executions combined from the extensive shelling an airstrikes etc. You can see the similarities between the Hama Massacre an the current war. So the Assad's have a history of violence towards their ppl. Basher Al-Assad became the president after his dad died in 2000, it would of been his older brother Bassel but he died in a car crash. Now the guy to really fear is Maher al-Assad, Bashar's younger brother he command's special forces who some call the "ghosts", his guys are responsible for massacres of innocent protesters beginning, a sniper who defected said Maher gave them orders to aim for the head or hurt of unarmed protesters an to keep killing until there were no more protests. Maher is also believed to control the Shabiha's which mean's ghost's, a mix of special forces, mercenaries, an local thugs who wear civilian clothes an were used to attack an kill protesters. They're suppose to be responsible for the Houla massacre, an the Al-Qubair massacre both took place between May an June 2012, Houla was two villages where mostly women an children were shot an knifed, an Al-Qubair was a farming settlement where women an children were stabbed an shot. So let it be clear the Assad's have always been dictators, an are not simply fighting terrorists as somebody posted earlier.

[Packlife]

I'm not so sure about the school yard bombing not being a chemical attack, one of the teachers said that they heard an explosion hit a building close by, when they went outside they heard jet's an as they were about to go inside they all started feeling a burning sensation, an the pain is supposedly horrible. The teacher also said they didn't hear another explosion after the first one that the burning came out of no where. I'm not an expert on WP but wouldn't you know it's coming at you?? It could be possible that this was a mix of two kinds of chemical weapons.

[Mittelwaechter]

Iran and the nuclear threat? Business as usual.

Scott Peterson at the Christian Science Monitor did a useful timeline for dire Israeli and US predictions of an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon, beginning 20 years ago.
1992: Israeli member of parliament Binyamin Netanyahu predicts that Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon.
1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres predicts an Iranian nuclear warhead by 1999 to French TV.
1995: The New York Times quotes US and Israeli officials saying that Iran would have the bomb by 2000.
1998: Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress that Iran could have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the US by 2003.
_______

Assad has been "elected" in 2007 - just like Bush has been "elected".

According to a NATO paper (from may iirc), 70% of the Syrians back Assad right now in this Syrian war on terror, 20% are neutral and 10% support the aggressors.
_______

White Phosphorus is a chemical weapon!

A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants". He claimed "it is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal." This denial has been accepted by most of the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times said, "ban its use on civilian but not military targets". But the word "civilian" does not occur in the chemical weapons convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.


The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the US has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC: "If ... the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because ... any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."


The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."


The blogger Gabriele Zamparini found a declassified document from the US department of defence, dated April 1991, and titled "Possible use of phosphorus chemical". "During the brutal crackdown that followed the Kurdish uprising," it alleges, "Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam may have possibly used white phosphorus (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil ... and Dohuk provinces, Iraq. The WP chemical was delivered by artillery rounds and helicopter gunships ... These reports of possible WP chemical weapon attacks spread quickly ... hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from these two areas." The Pentagon is in no doubt, in other words, that white phosphorus is an illegal chemical weapon.