Afgelopen maandag ontving ik van Information Clearing House o.a. een artikel, waarin het VN onderzoek naar het beschieten van een konvooi met hulpgoederen voor Oost-Aleppo (september vorig jaar), terecht als een waardeloos onderzoek de grond in wordt geschreven.
Zo heeft de VN getuigenissen van de White Helmets gebruikt, terwijl ieder mens met een gezond verstand kan weten, dat de White Helmets een verlengstuk zijn van terreurgroepen in Syrië (vooral functionerend onder Al Qaida/al-Nusra terreurbewind..)……
Fotomateriaal, zoals van satellieten (die ter beschikking stonden van de VN onderzoekscommissie), of zelfs van de White Helmets werden niet aan het rapport toegevoegd, logisch wat betreft de laatste foto’s, daar de foto’s van raketten die de White Helmets toevoegden, niet van Russische of Syrische gevechtsvliegtuigen kwamen, maar van raketten zijn, die vanaf de grond worden afgevuurd, zoals de White Helmets zelf hebben toegegeven……. De White Helmets, u weet wel het geteisem dat hier op handen wordt gedragen, niet alleen door politici, maar ook door de reguliere (afhankelijke) massamedia……..
Hier het artikel (u kunt onder dit artikel klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’):
A
Flawed UN Investigation on Syria
U.N.
investigators increasingly make their conclusions fall in line with
Western propaganda, especially on the war in Syria, as occurred in a
distorted report about last year’s attack on an aid convoy,
explains Gareth Porter.
By
Gareth Porter
March
13, 2017 “Information
Clearing House” – The March 1 report
by the United Nations’ “Independent International Commission of
Inquiry“
asserted that the bloody attack on a humanitarian aid convoy west of
Aleppo City on Sept. 19, 2016, was an airstrike by Syrian government
planes. But an analysis of the U.N. panel’s report shows that it
was based on an account of the attack from the pro-rebel Syrian
“White Helmets” civil defense organization that was full of
internal contradictions.
The
UN account also was not supported by either the photographic evidence
that the White Helmets provided or by satellite imagery that was
available to the commission, according to independent experts.
Further undermining the UN report’s credibility, the White Helmets
now acknowledge that rockets they photographed were not fired from
Russian or Syrian planes but from the ground.
Like
last December’s summary of the UN’s Headquarters
Board of Inquiry report on
the same incident, the Commission’s report described the attack as
having begun with “barrel bombs” dropped by Syrian helicopters,
followed by further bombing by fixed-wing planes and, finally,
strafing by machine guns from the air.
The
March 1 report did not identify any specific source for its
narrative, citing only “[c]ommunications from governments and
non-government organizations.” But in fact the UN investigators
accepted the version of events provided by the White Helmets chief in
Aleppo province as well as specific evidence that the White Helmets
had made public.
The
White Helmets, which are heavily funded by Western governments and
operate only in rebel-controlled areas, are famous for using social
media to upload videos purporting to show injured children and other
civilian victims of the war.
Last
year, a well-organized campaign pushed the group’s nomination for a
Nobel Peace Prize and a
Netflix film about the group won an Oscar last
month. The United Nations and the mainstream Western news media have
frequently relied on White Helmets accounts
from war zones that are not accessible to outsiders. But the White
Helmets’ officials have pursued an obvious political agenda in
support of opposition forces in Al Qaeda-dominated zones in Aleppo
and Idlib where they have operated.
On
Sept. 19, immediately after the attack on the aid convoy, the chief
of the White Helmets organization in the Aleppo governorate, Ammar
al-Selmo, presented a dramatic narrative of a Russian-Syrian air
attack, but it was marked by obvious internal contradictions.
At
first, Selmo claimed
in an interview that
he had been more than a kilometer away from the warehouses where the
attack occurred and had seen Syrian helicopters dropping “barrel
bombs” on the site. But his eyewitness account would have been
impossible because it was already dark by the time he said the attack
began at about 7:15 p.m. He changed
his story in
a later interview, claiming that he had been right across the street
at the moment of the attack and had heard the “barrel bombs”
being dropped rather than seeing them.
Selmo
insisted in a video filmed that night that the attack began with
Syrian helicopters dropping eight
“barrel bombs,”which
are described as large, crudely constructed bombs weighing from 250
kg to 500 kg or even more. Citing a box-shaped indentation in the
rubble, Selmo said the video is showing “the box of the barrel
bomb,” but the indentation is far too small to be a crater from
such a bomb.
Selmo
continued the account, “Then the regime also target this place with
cluster bombs two times, and also the aircraft of the Russians target
this place with C-5 and with bullets,” apparently referring to
Soviet-era S-5 rockets. The White Helmets photographed two such
rockets and sent it to media outlets, including the Washington Post,
which published
the picture in
the Post story with credit to the White Helmets.
Story
Contradictions
But
Hussein Badawi, apparently the White Helmet official in charge of the
Urum al Kubrah area, contradicted
Selmo’s story.
In a separate interview, Badawi said the attack had begun not with
“barrel bombs” but with “four consecutive rockets” that he
said had been launched by government forces from their defense plant
in Aleppo province – meaning that it was a ground-launched attack
rather than an air attack.
In
an email response to a query from me, Selmo retracted his own
original claim about the S-5 rockets. “[B]efore aircraft’s attack
on the area,” he wrote, “many land to land missiles attacked the
place coming from the defense factories which [are] located in
eastern Aleppo [east of] the city, regime controlled area. [T]hen
aircraft came and attacked the place.”
But
such a rocket attack from that “regime controlled area” would not
have been technically possible. The Syrian government defense plant
is located in Safira, 25
kilometers southeast of
Aleppo City and even farther from Urum al-Kubrah, whereas the S-5
rockets that the White Helmets photographed have a range
of only three or four kilometers.
Moreover,
the Russians and Syrian government forces were not the only warring
parties to have S-5s in their arsenal. According to a study
of the S-5 rocket by Armament Research Services consultancy,
Syrian armed opposition forces had been using S-5 rockets as well.
They had gotten them from the CIA’s covert program of moving
weapons from Libyan government stockpiles to be distributed to Syrian
rebels beginning in late 2011 or early 2012. Syrian rebels had used
improvised launch systems to fire them, as the ARS study documented
with a picture.
Significantly,
too, the explicit claim by Selmo that Russian planes were involved in
the attack, which was immediately echoed by the Pentagon, was
summarily dismissed by the UN panel report, which stated flatly,
without further explanation, that “no Russian strike aircraft were
nearby during the attack.”
Misplaced
Evidence
Yet,
despite the multiple discrepancies in the White Helmets’ story, the
UN investigators said they corroborated the account of the air attack
“by a site assessment, including analysis of remnants of aerial
bombs and rockets documented at the site, as well as satellite
imagery showing impact consistent with the use of air-delivered
munitions.”
The
UN Commission’s report cited a photograph of the crumpled tailfin
of a Russian OFAB-250 bomb found under some boxes in a warehouse as
evidence that it had been used in the attack. The White Helmets took
the photograph and circulated it to the news media, including
to the Washington Post and to
the Bellingcat website,
which specializes in countering Russia’s claims about its
operations in Syria.
But
that bomb could not have exploded in that spot because it would have
made a crater many times larger than the small indentation in the
floor in the White Helmet photo – as shown
in this video of
a man standing in the crater of a similar bomb in Palmyra.
Something
other than an OFAB-250 bomb – such as an S-5 rocket – had caused
the fine shrapnel tears in the boxes shown in the photo, as a detail
from the larger scene reveals.
So the OFAB bomb tailfin must have been placed at the scene after the
attack.
Both
UN imagery analysts and independent experts who examined the
satellite images found that the impact craters could not have come
from the “aerial bombs” cited by the Commission.
The
analysis of the satellite images by United Nations specialists at
UNITAR-UNOSAT made
public by
the UN Office of Humanitarian Coordination on March 1 further
contradicts the White Helmet account, reflecting the absence of any
evidence of either “barrel bombs” or OFAB-250 bombs dropped on
the site.
The
UN analysts identified four spots in the images on pages five and six
of their report as “possible impact craters.” But a UN source
familiar with their analysis of the images told me that it had ruled
out the possibility that those impact points could have been caused
by either “barrel bombs” or Russian OFAB-250 bombs.
The
reason, the UN source said, was that such bombs would have left much
larger craters than those found in the images. Those possible impact
points could have been either from much smaller air-launched
munitions or from ground-based artillery or mortar fire, but not from
either of those weapons, according to the UN source.
Expert
Challenges
A
former U.S. intelligence official with long experience in analysis of
aerial photos and Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon analyst, both of
whom reviewed the satellite images, agreed that the spots identified
by UNOSAT could not have been from either “barrel bombs” or
OFAB-250 bombs.
The
former intelligence official, who demanded anonymity because he still
deals with government officials, said the small impact points
identified by the UN team reminded him of impacts from “a multiple
rocket launcher or possibly a mortar.”
Sprey
agreed that all of those impact points could have been from artillery
or mortar fire but also noted that photographs of the trucks and
other damaged vehicles show no evidence that they were hit by an
airstrike. The photos show only extensive fire damage and, in the
case of one car, holes of irregular size and shape, he said,
suggesting flying debris rather than bomb shrapnel.
Sprey
further pointed to photographic evidence indicating that an explosion
that the UN Commission blamed on a Syrian airstrike came from within
the building itself, not from an external blast. The building across
the street from some of the trucks destroyed by an explosion
(in Figure
9 of
a series of photos
on the Bellngcat website)
clearly shows that the front wall of the building was blown outward
toward the road, whereas
the rear wall and the roof were still intact.
The
photograph (in Figure 10) taken from inside the remains of that same
building shows the debris from the blast was blown all the way across
the street to the damaged truck. Sprey said those pictures strongly
suggest that an IED (improvised explosive device) had been set in the
house to explode toward the trucks.
In
embracing the Syrian-air-strike narrative – although it falls apart
on closer examination – the UN“Commission of Inquiry” thus fell
into line with the dominant Western political bias in favor of the
armed opposition to the Syrian government, a prejudice that has been
applied to the Syrian conflict by UN organs since the beginning of
the war in 2011.
But
never has the evidence so clearly contradicted that line as it has in
this case – even though you will not learn that by reading or
watching the West’s commercial news media.
Gareth
Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of
the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly
published Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
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Bijna nog sterker: gisteren maakte een VN commissie openbaar, dat het Syrische leger met opzet de watervoorziening van Damascus zou hebben gebombardeerd; dat zou in december vorig jaar zijn gebeurd*. Daardoor zouden meer dan 5 miljoen mensen verstoken zijn geweest van drinkwater in en rond Damascus….. Een ernstige oorlogsmisdaad aldus de onderzoekers……. Helaas, waarom zou het Syrische leger de eigen watervoorziening bombarderen, immers dat gebied was toen in handen van het reguliere Syrische leger..?? Bron voor deze toevoeging o.a.: BBC World Service 14 maart jl.
* In een reactie van mij, gisteren gedaan onder dit artikel, geplaatst door Stan van Houcke op zijn blog, meende ik, dat dit september vorig jaar plaatsvond. Deze reactie ziet u direct voorafgaand aan: ‘Bron voor deze enz….’, al is het hier met een aangepast tijdspanne.
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terug kan vinden, dit geldt (nog) niet voor de labels: al-Selmo, H, Badawi, Sprey en UNOSAT.
