BICOM

The White House yesterday sent a letter to Congress, which for the first time said that evidence indicates Syrian President Assad has used sarin nerve gas.

US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had earlier this week distanced the United States from an Israeli intelligence report that claimed that Assad’s forces had used sarin nerve gas on 19 March in an attack near Aleppo, which is thought to have killed 26 people. According to media reports, Israel’s assessment was based on UK intelligence on which French officials are also widely reported to concur. However, Hagel insisted that the United States would have to rely on its own intelligence before coming to conclusions.

The United States’ position was clarified yesterday in a letter from the White House addressed to Congress, after the US Senate Committee on Armed Services had requested clarification. The letter stated “Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.” President Obama warned last August that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would constitute a “red line” being crossed and would be considered a “game changer.”

However, yesterday’s White House letter included the caveat that the current assessment is based on “physiological samples” but “only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making.”

Nonetheless, yesterday’s letter will increase calls for President Obama to intervene in Syria’s bloody internal conflict. Senator John McCain, a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services said yesterday that it is “pretty clear that the red line has been crossed” and urged arming selected opposition groups. Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee commented that “action must be taken to prevent larger-scale use” of chemical weapons.