The Ghouta Chemical Attacks of 2013 and the End of the Arab Spring in Syria

This publication brings to the fore several sociopolitical and legal dimensions related to the international response to the Ghouta chemical attack on the 21st of August 2013 - the date that ultimately signifies the beginning of the end of the Arab Spring in Syria and the beginning of the new phase that led the actors involved in the local theater of war to a slippery slope of a civil war in Syria. From my perspective, this deadly chemical assault accounts for one of the most important events that defined the way the international community has dealt with the Syrian Arab Spring, for, according to several influential accounts, the magnitude of this attack clearly transcended the inviolability of the nation-state. Yet, despite gathering compelling prima facie evidence that this attack was linked to Bashar al-Assad's loyalists, the expected full-blown military retaliation against his regime did not occur. The Syrian regime did not face any severe consequences for its actions except for being exposed to the discomfort of temporary international sanctions that obliged the regime to relinquish its chemical weapons arsenal under international supervision. We know today that despite the promised full cooperation from Syrian officials, the mandate to relinquish all illegal weapons of mass destruction was fulfilled only to a limited extent, and soon afterward, Syria became the site of a number of regime chemical attacks, at least up until early 2019.[1] Morgan Ortagus from the US State Department claims that "the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on its own people at least 50 times since the conflict began".