Satellite photo of the Shayrat Airfield in the Homs region of Syria. Picture by USA TODAY Network/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In essence, the theories that circulated questionning the Assad regime's responsibility for the April chemical attack on Douma rest on two core claims: Firstly, that the Assad regime has been ‘winning the war’, and hence has no need to deploy chemical weapons; and secondly, that the attack ‘conveniently’ came after a US declaration that it was withdrawing from the conflict. Here, the rebels would benefit from such an attack if it brought intervention against the regime
Each of these theories, in turn, are based on crucial assumptions.
“Assad was already winning the war”
1. One of the main assumptions on which this notion rests is that there have been effectively only ‘three’ chemical attacks that the regime has been accused of ‘by the west’: Ghouta 2013, Khan Shaykhoun 2017 and Douma 2018. According to this reading, on each occasion western powers have jumped on these incidents to launch an attack on the Syrian regime
