DISINFO: White Helmets are frank falsifiers
SUMMARY
The White Helmets are still doing everything they can to prove to the international community that Syrian President Bashar Assad is poisoning his people with either bleach or sarin-zaman-V-gases. And Washington itself is doing everything possible to make people believe these frank falsifiers. Because [the US] needs to throw Assad out at any cost.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring disinformation narrative deflecting blame for chemical attacks away from the Assad regime. It also aims to discredit the OPCW in addition to labelling the White Helmets as terrorists or as accomplices of terrorist organisations by staging and/or perpetrating chemical attacks. These claims are not supported by evidence. The UN-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism found Syria’s Government responsible for the April 2017 attack in Khan Shaykhun. On April 2018, Russia vetoed a US-drafted UN Security Council resolution that would have created a new inquiry to ascertain responsibility for chemical weapons attacks in Syria. In June 2018, the OPCW members granted it the power to assign responsibility for chemical attacks. Read more about the “alleged” usage of chemical weapons in Douma. For more disinformation cases attempting to discredit the OPCW, see here. [Note: Another disinformation case from the same article is that it is false to assign equal responsibility for the outbreak of WWII to the USSR as to Nazi Germany.]