Publication

This paper addresses the danger represented by the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. On March 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned that "an increasingly beleaguered regime, having found its escalation of violence through conventional means inadequate, might be prepared to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people." Meanwhile, the state-controlled Syrian Arab News Agency reported that twenty-five were killed and eighty-six injured on 19 March 2013 by a rebel chemical attack in the town of Khan al-Assal, near the city of Aleppo.