Bashar al-Assad’s regime has almost certainly, again, used chemical weapons to gas and choke besieged inhabitants of a rebel enclave, on Saturday in Douma, east of the capital, Damascus. At least 48 people were killed and hundreds more injured. The suffering of the victims, according to the Syrian American Medical Society, a relief organisation, was consistent with the chlorine gas the regime often uses — but this time mixed with a nerve agent.
This is no surprise. The previous large documented chemical attack — when the regime used nerve gas to kill more than 80 people at Khan Sheikhoun in a rebel area of north-west Syria a year ago — provoked US president Donald Trump to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base in reprisal.
That was a more robust response than Barack Obama’s in August 2013, after the Assad regime crossed what the then US president had set as a “red line” and killed an estimated 1,400 civilians in a sarin gas attack in the eastern Ghouta area of which Douma is a part. He cancelled a punitive response, in a climbdown that dented US credibility and all but invited President Vladimir Putin’s Russia to storm back into the Middle East.