September 14, 2004
WAR: Excess of Evil
German newspaper Die Welt, "citing unnamed western security sources," charges that Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people:
It said that witnesses quoted by an Arabic news website called ILAF in an article on August 2 had said that several frozen bodies arrived suddenly at the "Al-Fashr Hospital" in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in June.
Die Welt said the sources had indicated that the weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan.
Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies.
Read the whole thing. (Link via The Corner). You will recall that Sudan was the site of a suspected chemical weapons factory (which may or may not have been an aspirin factory instead of or in addition to manufacturing chemical weapons) that had ties to both Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, according to Clinton Administration officials justifying the 1998 bombing of the factory.
I don't know... the German media doesn't have a great track record when it comes to throwing out these types of accusations (as opposed to the American media, which is spotless...). The term "unnamed source" always reads as "take with a grain of salt" to me.