Time Ticking To Prove Gas Attack
Updated: 12:24pm UK, Thursday 22 August 2013
By Alex Rossi, Sky Correspondent
The video evidence is compelling.
The pictures are horrific.
Hours of footage has now emerged on YouTube of children and adults suffering from what appear to be the after-effects of a chemical attack.
Many of the images are too distressing to show.
They would also be phenomenally difficult to stage.
Directing children to appear to be choking to death in such detail would take the budget and expertise of a Hollywood director - most experts say that this is clearly not the case.
There is now a weight of agreement that the pictures show - incontrovertibly - the aftermath of a deadly chemical assault.
The numbers of dead also suggest that that analysis is the correct one - the death toll just keeps on rising.
On Wednesday there were many questions as to why medical staff and first aiders had not been affected by secondary contamination?
Twenty four hours on and that question has been answered - they are; it just took time.
Many of the people who treated the victims are suffering the deadly consequences of exposure to a lethal nerve agent.
Experts say the timescale is similar to what was seen in the Tokyo subway attack in 1995 when sarin gas was used.
The former head of the British Army's chemical weapons unit, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, said while video can never be 100% conclusive the evidence it presents is overwhelming.
"It very much looks like a chemical agent has been used, perhaps a nerve agent - the fact that staff have now died as well is revealing. It is disturbingly similar to what was seen in Halabja in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
But nonetheless without investigation on the ground there are too many questions as to what really happened and who is responsible.
The Russians for instance claim what we are witnessing is an attempt to discredit the Assad regime.
YouTube after all has been used extensively by both sides to spread propaganda throughout the conflict.
The opposition, for example, knows that the widespread use of chemical weapons would be a 'Red Line' issue for the White House and the international community and could trigger Western intervention.
President Assad certainly has the capability to carry out such an assault - it is believed the regime has one of the biggest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the world - but the only way to know for certain is to get a an expert UN inspection team out on the ground.
That though is easier said than done.
Although the attacks have taken place just 20 minutes outside central Damascus the area is unsafe.
The UN is unlikely to allow the inspectors, who are already in place, to go there without a guaranteed cessation in the violence.
President Assad is also unlikely to give them permission to travel to the district of eastern Ghouta.
And there lies the problem - if a nerve agent like sarin has been used it would be a race against the clock as the evidence at the crime scene will evaporate in the coming days and weeks.
Without the on the ground analysis then, there cannot be a 100% certainty of what really happened, or who carried out the attack.
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