French Justice has issued several international arrest warrants against Syrian President Bashar Assad, his brother and two Army generals for chemical attacks with sarin gas, or nerve gas, perpetrated in 2013 during the war in the country. The leader is accused of complicity in crimes against humanity.
This has been announced by the lawyers of the Syrian victims, according to the AFP agency. The investigating judges of the Paris Judicial Court, which has a unit specialized in Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes, are investigating these attacks that left more than a thousand dead in August of that year in a suburb of Damascus held by the rebels, according to figures from the American intelligence services.
The investigation began in 2021 following a complaint from the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and the Syrian Archive. The Syrian regime is the subject of several investigations: in May, several people responsible for the death of two Franco-Syrian citizens will be tried in Paris.
The international community accuses Assad’s government of being responsible for these sarin gas attacks, while he always blamed the rebel forces for them and assured that he had handed over his entire arsenal. Heads of state are not usually the subject of arrest warrants, as they benefit from procedural immunity, but an exception is made when they are accused of crimes against humanity or genocide, as has happened with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
In 2011, the Syrian president was expelled from the Arab League for his responsibility in the civilian deaths in his country during the war. The UN commission investigating war crimes committed in Syria also accused the Damascus regime. He documented more than thirty attacks with this gas. Assad has been in power since 2000. In 2021 elections were held and he won again.