As US and OPCW move on, Brazil puts Syria cover-up on the record

In a rare protest, Brazil has challenged the chemical watchdog's admitted suppression of findings that undercut Trump's pretext for bombing Syria in 2018.

(Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)

In just two days this month, the new government of Syria was handed two major victories toward reversing the country’s longstanding pariah status in the US-dominated global order.

At the NATO summit in Turkey, President Trump announced the removal of Syria from the list of states accused of sponsoring terrorism. Trump’s decision will ease decades of sanctions that have crippled Syria’s economy and helped oust Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. It also marks a public relations victory for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the insurgent leader who replaced Assad in Damascus. Al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is a former ISIS deputy leader and the founding leader of the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, both designated by the US as terrorist organizations.

The following day, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) gave Syria’s ruling Al Qaeda offshoot another stamp of international approval. The Executive Council of the world’s top chemical watchdog restored the voting privileges that Syria lost in 2021 over allegations that the Assad government used chemical weapons and hid elements of its arsenal.

The two decisions have a direct tie. The widespread narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people was invoked to justify the US-led regime change war that ultimately led to Assad’s overthrow.

Yet while the Trump administration and OPCW are granting Syria’s new rulers a clean slate, not everyone is ready to turn the page, or accept the conventional story about the former government’s purported chemical attacks.

The OPCW leadership faces continued scrutiny over a cover-up that calls the Syria chemical weapons allegations, and the OPCW’s own independence and scientific integrity, into question. During this month’s session of the Executive Council, the Brazilian government lodged a rare formal protest over the OPCW’s manipulation of an investigation into an alleged April 2018 chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma.

At issue for the Brazilians was the suppression of a critical finding in the OPCW’s Douma probe. As I reported in May, the OPCW, after years of stonewalling, recently acknowledged concealing the “highly protected” assessment of German military toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of dozens of deaths in Douma.

The toxicologists’ censored findings, along with other buried evidence, undermined the OPCW’s public claims that there was a chlorine attack in Douma, and that the Syrian government was responsible. The suppressed evidence instead pointed to a false flag, as one of the toxicologists even speculated. After keeping this from the public, the OPCW published reports on the Douma incident that aligned with the first-term Trump administration and its British and French allies. These states bombed Syria in April 2018 over what they alleged was a Syrian government chemical attack in Douma.

In Brazil’s National Statement to the Council, Ambassador Fernando Simas Magalhães argued that the OPCW cover-up calls into question the Douma investigation’s legitimacy. “Recent findings,” Magalhães said, “...have pointed to the exclusion of expert toxicological opinions from the final Douma report, which may have had an impact on the robustness of the conclusions of the investigation.”

The “recent findings” refer to a legal case at the Administrative Tribunal of the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO). The tribunal ruled in favor of Dr. Brendan Whelan, a former OPCW inspector who challenged the manipulation of the Douma probe. During those legal proceedings, the OPCW inadvertently acknowledged the very act that Whelan had been protesting as a Douma team member since 2018: that the Organisation was guilty of scientific censorship.

The Brazilian government’s high-level rebuke is not the first time that the OPCW has been challenged over the suppression of the toxicological findings. Yet each time the issue has been raised, OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias has refused to even acknowledge it, let alone respond.

Brazil’s intervention is unique because it was made during a formal session of the OPCW’s policy-making organ, the Executive Council. Accordingly, it had to be recorded in the Organisation’s official records and posted publicly, at Brazil’s request. After years in which the OPCW evaded questions about the toxicologists’ buried findings, the issue is now, for the first time, permanently memorialized on the chemical watchdog’s own website. Arias has yet to offer a response.

In his statement, the Brazilian ambassador also framed the credibility crisis inside the OPCW over the Douma cover-up and its broader Syria mandate as not just the responsibility of the Technical Secretariat (TS), the working body headed by Director-General Arias, but principally of the Member States of the OPCW and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC):

At present, [the OPCW] faces the challenge of sustaining effectiveness and confidence in an increasingly complex and polarised environment. This responsibility lies primarily with member states, with the support of the TS. One area where these pressures are most clearly reflected is the Syria file.

In other words, Brazil argued, it is the Secretariat’s paymasters, the Member States, which must ensure the Organisation’s credibility.

At a UN Security Council briefing in June, China’s ambassador similarly argued that the OPCW’s activities in Syria “have become a hallmark of the OPCW being politicized, seriously jeopardizing its authority and effectiveness.” Echoing Brazil’s criticism, China also suggested that the OPCW has failed to “maintain an objective and impartial position” in its Syria probes, which risk failing to “stand the test of history.”

Brazil is well-placed to challenge the OPCW’s politicization. The watchdog’s founding director-general, José Bustani, is a veteran Brazilian diplomat who personally resisted another attempt to instrumentalize the organization for a US-led regime change campaign in the Middle East. In 2002, the Bush administration engineered Bustani’s ouster for trying to facilitate Iraq’s entry into the Chemical Weapons Convention, which impeded the White House’s plans for war. Bustani stood his ground even after then-US Under Secretary of State John Bolton threatened to harm his children. Nearly two decades later, Bustani tried to testify at the UN in protest of the Douma cover-up, but the US and its allies blocked him from speaking. By contrast, these same states have continued to heap praise on Arias as he’s joined them in stonewalling accountability for the Douma deception.

Bustani and former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck have spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, an initiative to address the OPCW scandal. Ahead of the Executive Council, the group sent a letter to each state party urging that “the issues raised by the OPCW’s own scientists be addressed in an open, transparent and objective manner.” By insisting on accountability for the manipulated Douma investigation, Brazil is refusing to let the OPCW fail the test of history.