Syria for the day

Nina Rai has an AllVoices article about the situation in Syria;

Syrian President Bashar Assad personally ordered the launch of three chemical weapons attacks against his own people, according to a defected former Syrian weapons chief, in a damning indictment of the Syrian regime which has vociferously denied ever using chemical weapons.
Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat— a former chief of chemical warfare in the 5th division in the contested Dera'a province in southern Syria— said he received orders directly from Assad to gas civilians, but could not bring himself to do it and so replaced chemicals canisters with harmless substitutes.
Sakat, based on his own intelligence sources, claimed Assad is dodging the terms of a Russian-brokered deal to destroy his chemical weapons arsenal by stealthily passing some of the deadly stocks to his allies. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Sakat, who has since defected to Jordan, claimed that Assad is trying to “cheat” the Russian-US deal, by sending a portion of his chemical weapons to allies in Lebanon and Iran.
According to the former Syrian general, chemical weapons attacks had been ordered– and were underway- long before the deadly carnage of 21 August 2013, in which chemical agent sarin had been used, killing more than fourteen hundred civilians in a Damascus suburb.
General Sakat said that, on three occasions, he was ordered to attack civilian targets in rebel-held districts of Sheikh Masqeen, Herak, and Busra. He said he was told to use a mixture of phosgene and two other chlorine-based gases against civilians, which are less lethal than sarin.
However, before each of the attacks— between October of 2012 and January of 2013— Sakat said he clandestinely replaced the chemical canisters with a mixture of bleach and water, which would give off the odor like deadly chemical weapons but not kill anybody.
The Syrian general said the regime was totally convinced that this was the same poisonous material. “In this way I saved hundreds of lives of children and others,’ he declared. But after the third such attempt in January, his bosses became suspicious at the lack of deaths caused by his "attacks" so he escaped to Jordan.
Saket also believed the Syrian regime perpetuated thirty-four chemical weapons attacks, and not just fourteen, as cited by international intelligence agencies. But he agreed with varied assessments that differing substances and concentrations were used, which is why there were varying accounts of deaths, with some attacks claiming fewer lives or none.
Saket, from Jordan, claimed he has been keeping up with the progress of the attacks using a network of informants. While publicly President Assad has agreed to hand over his weapons to the UN, even Russian officials are skeptical and state they are making plans in the event Assad “cheats” the system.
However, General Sakat said that, even before the Russian–US deal was brokered, the Syrian regime had begun siphoning off its deadly weapons to militant organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon at four different locations.
A spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, backed the general’s claims by saying: “We, along with many other international sources learned, through documents and other evidence, about the transfer of Syrian chemical weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon nearly three months ago.”

Rico says that, if we nuke these fucks, no one will miss them except their mothers...