The pictures coming out of Khan Sheikhoun are horrific. Children foaming at the mouth, some with terrible head wounds. No wonder the reaction of the world has been outrage. 'Assad must go' has been revived as a catchphrase in the West.
We are right to be appalled. Nevertheless, several features about the reported sarin attack in Syria's Idlib Governorate should give pause in the current rush to judgment. Firstly, while you wouldn't know it from much of the media, the facts themselves are contested.
The first reports from inside Syria (on which the world relied) came from rebel news agencies and the 'White Helmets', a group set up in Turkey by a former British special forces officer which operates exclusively in rebel-held areas of Syria and has been closely associated with rebel military formations.
These reports claim that the Syrian government attacked the town, launching the feared nerve agent sarin in airstrikes. The pictures released to prove this show first responders from the White Helmets treating the victims just after the attacks.
Sarin, like other nerve agents, disrupts the operation of enzymes involved in transmitting nerve impulses, causing the body to seize up. Death comes by suffocation. Crucially, however, it is absorbed through the skin. The pictures released show the rescuers apparently unharmed, notwithstanding their bare hands, face (except for a standard gas mask) and loose fitting clothing.
If it was a sarin attack, the rescuers would be as dead as their victims. This already casts doubt on the narrative — a doubt increased by the fact that Syria's last Category 1 chemical weapons (including sarin) were certified destroyed aboard a US warship in 2014 under the supervision of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons. Later reports suggest that chlorine was in fact the agent involved.
The Russians and Syrians claim that, while there was an airstrike by their forces, it used ordinary explosives and that what was hit was a rebel munitions dump, possibly containing chemicals.
Western sources have claimed that this is unlikely because nerve agents would be destroyed by such a strike. That may be so although sarin is often launched using conventional artillery and whether or not this would be true of chlorine or other chemical stockpiles is even less clear. No independent party has yet got to the scene and so the allegations on both sides remain just that.
"So abhorrent are chemical weapons to the civilised world that no-one would