Classified U.S. Military Document: Syrian Rebels DO Have Chemical Weapons

Posted on September 12, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Al Qaeda In Syria Had Sarin Before August Attack

We’ve extensively documented that the Syrian rebels do have access to chemical weapons.

It turns out that a classified U.S. military document says the same thing.

A former senior security policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense, F. Michael Maloof,reports at WND:

In a classified document just obtained by WND, the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.

The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo.

The document, classified Secret/Noforn – “Not for foreign distribution” – came from the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC, and was made available to WND Tuesday.

It revealed that AQI had produced a “bench-scale” form of sarin in Iraq and then transferred it to Turkey.

A U.S. military source said there were a number of interrogations as well as some clan reports as part of what the document said were “50 general indicators to monitor progress and characterize the state of the ANF/AQI-associated Sarin chemical warfare agent developing effort.”

“This (document) depicts our assessment of the status of effort at its peak – primarily research and procurement activities – when disrupted in late May 2013 with the arrest of several key individuals in Iraq and Turkey,” the document said.

“Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests,” the NGIC document said.

The May 2013 seizure occurred when Turkish security forces discovered a two-kilogram cylinder with sarin gas while searching homes of Syrian militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra Front following their initial detention.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamic radicals detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia.

Some 12 suspected members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested. At the time, they were described by Turkish special anti-terror forces as the “most aggressive and successful arm” of the Syrian rebels.

In the seizure, Turkish anti-terror police also found a cache of weapons, documents and digital data.

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Sources tell WND the documentation indicates that deadly sarin poison gas was manufactured in a Sunni-controlled region of Iraq and then transported to Turkey for use by the Syrian opposition, whose ranks have swelled with members of al-Qaida and affiliated groups.

High-level former U.S. intelligence officers say that it was the rebels – not the Syrian government – which carried out the chemical weapons attack.

They note that their high-level intelligence colleagues currently working in U.S. intelligence agenciesagree.

The director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare from 1988 to 2004 – who was a former senior consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State – (Yossef Bodansky) also says that the rebels were the perpetrators of the chemical attack.