Syrian chemical attack victims and Syrian rights groups have filed a criminal complaint in France, where courts have a mandate to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity even if committed by foreign nationals on foreign territory.
An April report by a new investigations team at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found the Syrian regime air force used sarin gas and chlorine on the village of Lataminah in March 2017.
The world’s most powerful country sidestepped responsibility, switched allies and left a power vacuum that threatens to destabilise the entire region.
Since the civil war began in 2011, Assad's regime launched 98 percent of such attacks, a German-based institute reports.
Russia says it carried out air strikes on a planned buffer zone around opposition bastion of Idlib, a day after an alleged toxic attack on regime-held city.
The Syrian regime is gearing up for an expected offensive in Idlib province, which is home to nearly 3 million people and has a large al Qaida presence in addition to opposition and rebel groups.
Initial findings by the OPCW into a suspected chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma indicate that chlorine may have been used but that there were no indications that a nerve agent was used in the April 7 attack.
The weaponisation of propaganda on Syria has gone from a cottage industry to a mainstream scourge. Does the propaganda enable the Assad regime's crimes?
The Organisation of the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said on Saturday the mission visited "one of the sites" in Douma, where at least 40 killed in a suspected gas attack on April 7, and would draft a report based on the findings.
Syrian regime media first reported that missiles were fired at the Shayrat air base near Homs and an air base in the capital Damascus. However state TV later said a false alarm had triggered air defence systems, and there was no attack.
Moscow slams the strikes as "aggressive actions" of the Western coalition, as the UN Security Council rejects Russia's draft resolution condemning the US-led strikes in Syria.
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