A child receives medical treatment after a sarin gas attack in the town of Douma, Syria on April 08, 2018. According to initial findings over 78 civilians perished in the attack. (Photo by Mouneb Taim/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Although the world is consumed with crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are stories from areas of conflict that deserve our attention. The murderous behavior of Bashar al-Assad's regime is one such story. While the world focuses elsewhere, the list of crimes committed by Assad's regime continues to grow, from refining the use of chemical weapons and weaponizing refugee flows to creating a breeding ground for ISIS and other terrorist groups.

This week, Hudson was joined by some of the leading experts on chemical weapons and terrorist financing to discuss a bombshell new report released by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that confirms the Assad regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

Hudson Senior Fellow Mike Doran was joined by US Special Representative for Syria Ambassador James Jeffrey, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense Policy, Emerging Threats, and Outreach Thomas DiNanno, and longtime terrorist financing expert Hudson Senior Fellow David Asher for a discussion on the report's findings and US initiatives to break the regime's "piggy bank" through economic warfare.

See below for key takeaways from their discussion, and be sure to join Hudson next week for a look at how COVID-19 has impacted global corruption, and the role of the Atlantic relationship during the pandemic.

Key Takeaways

Highlighted quotes from the event, "Maximum Pressure on the Assad Regime for its Chemical Weapons Use and Other Atrocities."

1. What the new OPCW report reveals:

DAS DiNanno: The report actually identifies the perpetrators, and is based on a nine-month investigation, that included interviews with eyewitnesses. It conducted reviews of testimony, it reviewed potential symptoms, chemical analysis that were taken on site, it analyzed the fragments of the ammunition of the ordinance that was used in question. It reviewed the satellite imagery, it reviewed site plans. So the level of detail when you read the report and if folks are interested enough to join this discussion, it might be a worthwhile read. It's not 500 pages, it's maybe 50 pages and it's incredibly detailed.​

2. Russia's involvement in the chlorine bombing of a Syrian hospital: 

Amb. Jeffrey: The Russians passed intelligence to the Syrians about the exact location of the hospital and then the Syrians dropped the bomb on the hospital. Is that right?

DAS DiNanno: Yeah. I would point out that the hospital was already underground. That was the only way that they could actually treat some of the casualties of the war. So an already struggling health infrastructure, barely functioning and they dropped a chlorine bomb on it. So again, the levels to which the Syrians and their backers, the Russians will go seem to know no bounds. 

In my interactions with [the Russians], they can't even look you in the eye across the table. They know full well that there's a red line that was crossed. The chemical weapons use. When you actually read the report, they dropped the chlorine bomb on a hospital. Just the levels of atrocity is astonishing.

3. Economic warfare as an effective tool against the Assad regime:

Asher: Ambassador Jeffrey has a tremendous tool that's about to come online called the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. It's going to allow secondary sanctions, so anybody who's touching the hand of a Syrian that's involved in anything bad from the standpoint of US law is going to be sanctionable.

We're on the verge, if we wish to pursue the opportunity, of obliterating the financial foundations of both the Assad regime and that of Lebanese Hezbollah as well. 

The most important thing is to scare, coerce, deter, dissuade those in the international financial system that provide a safe harbor, not just to the procurement architecture of Assad regime's WMD programs, but I want to go after Assad's personal piggy bank. We have a lot of knowledge. We have a lot of capabilities declared publicly over the years to track terrorism finances. Ambassador Jeffrey has put together a team who know their targets and have the flow of critical information. They've effectively sanctioned almost every major aspect of the [research arm of the] WMD program of Syria. 

4. Russia's efforts to have the international community pick up the tab on reconstruction in Syria:

Doran: The Russians want the Europeans to come in and to pay for reconstruction of Syria because the Syrian regime can't pay for it and Russia can't pay for it. They want to get us used to the fact that the Assad regime behaves like this and then slowly come in and start paying for reconstruction while they benefit, while they reap the strategic rewards. What we're doing, if I read you correctly, is that we're denying them that money that they covet. Is that the essence of it?

Amb. Jeffrey: To some degree. The Russians are basically saying, "[Assad] is so awful. This guy is so much of a threat to you. Look at the terrorist attacks in 2015 and '16. Look at the refugee waves the same year. This is the gift that just keeps on giving terrible things. Unless you get behind us, Russia, to save Assad by making him…” We don't know what, fat and happy, there is no real answer to what the Russians want other than reconstruction money to flow from international organizations, Europe, the Arab world and America and for everybody to recognize Assad as the leader of Syria. That's not going to happen.

5. The danger of allowing Assad's continued development of chemical weapons:

DAS DiNanno: [The Assad regime is] maintaining an infrastructure to procure and acquire logistics to deploy such weapons. It has to be troubling for everybody involved in chemical weapons. Again, these are now active and again as we see, they're usable. It’s very troubling.

Asher: This is a zone of conflict that ultimately could be the site of much more plausibly of a future 9/11. When I came back to State in 2014, 2015, to build the economic campaign against the Islamic State, Syria was disproportionately a central player in that. We can't ignore that Syria is much more interconnected and much more of a geographical threat to our national security interest. It's not just some place in the Middle East that we forgotten about. It's actually existential to our security.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity

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