The Khan Sheikhun
Sarin Bomb Hoax

NB: ARTICLE IN PROGRESS

Author: @JohnDelacour ⬅ Click link for related tweets

Latest update: 4 July, 2017 (section heads added)

Introduction

The purpose of this article is not to argue the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores, of the Khan Sheikhun affair of 4th April, 2017, but to expose the drama as a hoax from beginning to end, and to accuse as far as possible those involved in its planning and execution, as well as those who, after the event, gave credence to the hoax and were complicit in covering up the true nature of the affair.

What the terrorists and their accomplices claim

It is claimed that at some ill-defined moment between 6:00 am and 7:30 am on 4th April, a Sukhoy Su-22 of the Syrian Arab Air Force dropped a chemical munition armed with the organophosphate sarin (or GB); that this munition struck the east side of the carriageway of a road leading north out of town to the bypass; that as a result of this ‘air strike’, about 80 people, including a huge proportion of children of both sexes but practically no adult women, died of sarin-poisoning and between 200 and 600 (depending on the narrator) were ‘injured’ or otherwise affected.

Note well that there is no dispute among the dramatists as to the number of chemical munitions that were dropped : a single sarin munition was dropped by a single Su-22 and landed in a much-photographed single place. Other bombs are alluded to by certain key players in the drama, but none of them is claimed by anybody to be relevant to our discussion. The sum total of the claims is, therefore, in essence:

Early on 4th April, Assad dropped a chemical weapon on his own people.
The sarin in the munition killed ~80 and affected hundreds more.
Assad is a butcher and the whole world must come to the aid of the terrorists because Assad’s people are making mincemeat of us in North Hama.

Needless to say, many detailed claims are made by various actors in support of these main claims, such as, that every single victim/patient driven the forty-odd miles to Binnish hospital, arrived there with pin-point pupils; and the purpose of this article is to demolish the whole story by reductio ad absurdum, though very little reduction will be necessary, since the whole tale is patently absurd to any intelligent observer.

How did the world come to know of this alleged atrocity?

When the KS story broke I was in the middle of completing a long and detailed article about the previous hoax, that was set (in the dramatic sense) only ten miles to the west of KS—namely the tale of the legless boy of al-Habit (Abdo al-Satouf). On the one hand, research into this hoax was very good preparation for the KS hoax, but on the other, I felt little inclined to trace the genesis of the sarin hoax, tweet by tweet, FB posting by FB posting. The propagators of the hoax were going to be the usual, by now familiar, suspects, both among the ‘opposition activists’ and terrorist reporters (such as al-Omar and al-Abdallah) and among the Turkish and Western shills and handlers. We could also guarantee ourselves a treat very soon from Anne Barnard in the New York Times. In the event this was to be a classic of the genre, almost worthy of the Brothers Grimm.

Whereas the prefabricated images and videos for the Abdo hoax were released to match the unfolding of the imaginary drama following the blowing off of Abdo’s legs by the Assad leg-seeking barrel bomb, in the case of the sarin massacre, everything bar the mass burial scenes was supposed to have taken place within the space of eight hours or so. Not only that : whereas the Abdo drama followed the fortunes of a single lad in one real or imaginary place at a time, the KS drama was taking place in many different places simultaneously and involved a huge number of actors. Consequently, within a short time there was a plethora of videos and photos; but chief among these were two very striking still photos signed EMC (Idlib Media Centre). Of these more anon, since the scene in these pictures was to become one of the more puzzling and alarming episodes in the whole drama.

The Videos—Over two hundred videos are to be found on YouTube documenting the Khan Sheikhun drama. It is most important to note that no information, or ‘metadata’, can be got from a YT video regarding the date and time that it was made. Google destroy any original metadata and replace it with their own. The YT user interface shows the date (Pacific Time) the video was published. It is also possible to discover the date and time the video was uploaded to YT with a view to publishing. Beyond that, all date information is erased. The only way to obtain the original metadata of any video is to remove it directly from the camera and extract the metadata.

Without corroborating evidence within the video itself, it is therefore impossible to say that it was made at a certain time. Much time has been wasted by Twitter researchers and others, trying to determine such things as wind direction from plumes of smoke, basing their hypotheses on YT videos for which they have no verified date. Such work is obviously pure lunacy!

In the case of the Abdo Hoax, unpublished photos and videos from up to two years previous to the alleged incident were used and presented as new. In the case of Khan Sheikhun, it is likely most of the filming was done over a space of one or two days, possibly in the summer of 2016. It is most unlikely that any of them were actually produced on the day. So far as I know, the only direct visual contact made with anybody in the area on the day was the short conversation Jon Snow of terrorist-supporting Channel 4 News had with Dr. Tennari of Muslim Brotherhood criminal NGO, SAMS. Tennari, who is alleged to have been at the hospital in Sarmin, is shown head and shoulders, wearing the dark green SAMS tunic, with a stethoscope round his neck, and standing against a primitively-decorated wall. There is no indication that he is in a hospital, let alone a hospital dealing with an emergency. Besides, Tennari, who will be mentioned later in this tale, is a man who apparently finds it impossible not only to tell the truth but even to look anybody in the eye.

As to the ‘NGO’ SAMS, the ‘Syrian-American Medical Society’, They, and their founder Zaher Sahloul, will feature quite prominently in what follows, since this outfit is central to the planning and execution of the hoax and to the subsequent perversion of the course of justice in collusion with far better-known organisations and individuals. Understanding the rôle of SAMS in this drama is essential to an understanding of how this hoax was perpetrated.

Initial assessment—On 6th April, having briefly studied the material and the reports available at the time, I tweeted a brief assessment of the state of affairs as I saw it. I have seen no evidence to cause me greatly to alter this initial assessment. I will expand on it slightly now:

Q.1—Was Khan Sheikhun bombed in the early morning of 4th April? Both the Russians and President Assad deny it, and the Russians say it was bombed nearer noon than dawn. In any case no chemical munition was dropped, and whether conventional munitions were dropped, and if so where, is frankly immaterial.
Q.3—What of the Russian tale? Over the years, I have concluded that spokesmen for the Ministry of Defence, especially Konashenkov, are not to be taken too seriously : they like to react promptly to false accusations, and as a result they sometimes react with unnecessary haste and with a tall story. Their tale of having hit a factory or warehouse storing chemical munitions not only set them up for ridicule but played into the hands of those who were purveying the hoax. Since they (or rather their partners, the Syrians) were accused of creating a sky-blue-pink London fog of sarin gas in Idlib, they decided to blame this impossible phenomenon on an accident, instead of waiting till their researchers had completed their work.
Q.5—Prefabrication of the materials and drugging of the ‘victims’. I remain convinced that the vast majority of the materials were prepared before 4th April. How long before, it ought to be possible to determine by proper forensic analysis of the videos, and eventually, when Khan Sheikhun is liberated, by questioning of those involved. As to the use of drugs to effect the production of some symptoms, I think there can be no doubt. However there is certainly some question as to whether certain of the ‘victims’ in the videos were in fact dead or dying, and not just drugged or acting. This is, of course, a very troubling question; but it is not actually germane to the question as to whether the SyAAF dropped a sarin bomb on the town. A little more on this anon.

Immediate alleged consequences of the alleged sarin bomb—The narrative concerning the ‘air strike’, or the lack of it, or gross contradictions in it ought really to suffice without further discussion to debunk the whole ‘chemical attack’ tale. I intend therefore to devote some space to it before going on to the other proofs.

Alas! either nobody in Khan Sheikhun had access to a clock or watch at the moment a ‘thump’ signalled to a male nurse in a cave a mile and a half away [sic] that a chemical munition had hit the tarmac. The time stated varies from precisely 6:00 am (Tennari) to after 7:00 am. Many ‘witnesses’ state no time, but a sort of consensus exists that the hole in the tarmac (of which more anon) appeared between 6:30 and 6:45. At this hour, naturally enough, and also by the tale of one Abdelhamid Yousef (of whom much more anon), most people we still abed or just rising.

This much-photographed and astonishingly dynamic hole in the road lies (supposing that this historic landmark as not been re-macadamed) close to a bakery and to a 2015 bomb-site next to a battery of damaged and disused grain silos to the east. Not far north up the road on the left is the Yousef filling station and, it is to be assumed, the quarter largely owned and inhabited by the innumerable Yousef clan that figure prominently in this tale.

Though most people were still in bed when the thump caused the hole, by the most remarkable stroke of fortune, a gang of White Helmets happened to be right there, by the ‘impact site’. What they were doing there, in this location so little likely to be in need of first response, will remain a mystery, and—like many mysteries—the stuff of fiction. Nevertheless the spokesman for this gang of altruists has the honour of figuring in a video right at the beginning of the bell¿ngcat article on the ‘chemical attack’. Not only were they there, but some of them were actually ‘injured’.

The very presence of these hardy perennials in this unlikely location at crack of dawn, far from any means of telling the time, would be astonishing enough, but those familiar with these crews and their works will certainly be dumbfounded to discover that there was nobody in that company possessed of so much as a smartphone, let alone a professional camera. To be plain, in the whole archive of documentation produced for this show, there is not a single picture of anybody near this dawn crater, so much as tottering, stumbling, or holding his nose, let alone lying flat on the ground, dead or about to die…

…and yet we are assured by an impeccable source (of whom more anon) that he arrived hotfoot from Kafr Zita to discover there, at the very impact site, four hundred people flat on the ground

When we heard that, I told staff in Zayta [Kafr Zita] Hospital, this is for sure chemicals.

We went back to the attack area and we saw people flat on the ground. Some were dead, some half-dead, some wounded, some were alive. There were close to 400 people.

Let me quickly recapitulate, using information only from highly respected sources, key witnesses to the events: A crew of White Helmets is in the vicinity of the bombed warehouse and the disused grain silos (probably not too far also from a dead bird). It is 6:30, just after sunrise and a pall of morning mist hangs over the country to the north of the town. Most people are still in bed. From the direction of Shayrat aerodrome in Homs, appears a SyAAF Sukhoy Su-22. It does a circuit over the town and drops a chemical bomb on a sparsely inhabited part on the northern outskirts of the town. Some of the White Helmets are injured. At this spot, within the time it takes Dr. Mamoun Morad to race to the spot from his hospital 11 miles away, are to be found four hundred people lying flat on the ground…well, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Dr. Trustworthy Morad is overstating the number in order to impress his young and foolish interlocutor; let’s halve his number and say two hundred rather than almost double it and take the precise number given by Dr. Tennari, whom we know to be incapable of telling the truth…

…so, at crack of dawn this fine spring day, temperature—let’s say 10°C, when most people are still in bed and most of the rest are at home preparing for the days exertions, a hole appears in a road in the north-western outskirts of the town, and either immediately or within a short time, two hundred people are lying near it, flat on the ground, without a soul nearby to record so much as a pin-point pupil, a frothing mouth or a last dying gasp of their misfortune.

Another dawn account

I alluded above to an article in the New York Times written on the very day of the ‘chemical attack’ by Anne Barnard and Patrick Kingsley. It is worth quoting a few excepts from this as examples of how award-winning journalists in the 21st century strain every orifice of their bodies to get the truth to the breakfast tables of their shrinking clientèle

REYHANLI, Turkey—After an airstrike on his village, a Syrian farmer hurried to rescue the initial victims of the attack, the residents of a one-story home.

But as Mohammad Nejdat Youssef neared the site, he ran headlong into what he described as “a winter fog—not quite yellow and not quite white.” He started to lose his balance, he said. His eyes began to sting. His nose started to stream. Finally, Mr. Youssef said, he started to foam at the mouth.

Mr. Youssef had been poisoned, one of the victims of Tuesday’s chemical attack in northern Syria, one of the deadliest chemical weapons attacks in years in the country, which killed dozens of people.

On second thoughts I’ll leave it there, You can read the article at the link at the top of this section. It is just too full of falsehood and invention. What is interesting about the article is that it introduces us to the Yousef mafia. The most prominent member of this clan (and probably the most useless and idiotic) is Abdelhamid al-Yousef, mentioned above, since it is he that was selected to exhibit his allegedly dead twins in video after video, to give three long and sobful interviews to the cream of the terrorist media, to perform in graveyard melodramas galore, to meet and slobber over the Erdog’s forehead at Hatay airport…in short, to play the onion-laden rôle of representative of the victims of the Putin/Assad sarinicide.

The article also makes the Turkey connexion very plain : not to excuse Barnyard Annie, it is nevertheless Kingsley who reports from Reyhanlı and uncritically relays the fiction of the Yousefs to his readers. Besides Abdelhamid, we shall also meet two more well-heeled Turkey-resident members of the Yousef clan as they tell their tales to Human Rights Watch, for the benefit of Ole Solvang, who will in turn first embellish the fiction and then relay it to the willing, deployed-within-24-hours, ears of the OPCW ‘Fact-Finding Mission’. To sum up, the New York Times article is pack of lies; but do please remember that ‘winter fog—not quite yellow and not quite white’—and all, presumably, issue of a bent pipe with the capacity of a couple of cocoa tins, stuck in a small hole in a road.

Map of the alleged ‘impact site of the sarin bomb’

Clicking on the image will open it zoomed in a new tab/window

Map showing the White Helmets HQ in relation to the silos— Much of the action in the main videos takes place at the fortified White Helmets HQ, which is built into the rock. This is also the location of what is referred to as the al-Rahma (Mercy) Hospital. By dint of repeating the name so often, I suppose they hope to give the impression that this is in fact a hospital, yet it is clear from all the many scenes staged here that it is nothing of the kind and is at no stage in any of the videos properly used as a hospital in the course of this alleged emergency.

What we know of the Mercy Hospital is as follows:

It is part and parcel of the White Helmets’ hide-out
It is well removed from human habitation and prying eyes
Access to the site can easily be restricted
It houses FOUR beds
It is equipped with some basic clinical apparatus
It comes under the auspices of criminal, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated “NGO”, SAMS
At no point in any of the videos is more than one of the beds occupied by a patient and at no point is anybody given any serious medical treatment in any of the beds. Most views of the room show all the beds empty.
At one point in the drama, while a reporter from the Aleppo Media Centre is reporting against the background of the four beds, an explosion is contrived. In videos and photos made after this, the room is shown thrown into disorder and unusable.

Clicking on the image will open it zoomed in a new tab/window

That hole in the road

Ignoring for the moment all questions as to the properties of sarin (GB) and the standard method of delivery of this chemical from the air, enquiring minds will want to know

Since the purpose of a sarin attack is to kill as many people as possible, why would any army carry out the attack on the outskirts of a town and drop the munition on a road having but a few houses on the one side and a deserted bomb-site and open fields on the other?
If the purpose of a sarin attack is to kill people, why would any army carry out the attack at crack of dawn in early spring when almost everybody would be asleep at home with the windows closed (the temperature is said to have been about 10°C) and thus be protected fairly effectively against the effects of the chemical?
By what stroke of fortune were the White Helmets (by their own tale) present at 6:30 in the morning in this district of the town at the very moment the hole in the road was made?
How is it that one goat and an anonymous ‘bird’ were allegedly killed by this alleged sarin, and yet not a single cat, dog or first responder in the vicinity was affected sufficiently to give up the ghost?
How is it that by the White Helmets’ tale, more than two hundred; by Mamoun Morad’s, four hundred; and by Tennari’s six hundred and forty people were affected by this chemical, 75-90 of them terminally, and that Morad arrived at the ‘impact site’ to find them all lying flat on the ground, and that vans and pick-ups raced to the scene from all quarters, on hearing of the disaster, to ferry the victims to hospitals……How is it that nobody, but nobody, made any photos or videos of this historic and appalling scene?

Now here I could insert a long section about that hole in the road and how its contents varied and changed shape and position; and if people insist I may add such a section in due course just to keep them happy. But I want to say just one thing about hoax features in general. Just as the murderer is said (falsely) to return to the scene of his crime, so it can be averred that any object, person, or turn of phrase that is returned to ad nauseam by the perpetrators of a hoax, can be guaranteed to hold the key to that hoax.

I now intend, therefore, to take two such nauseous features—namely the aforementioned Abdelhamid Yousef and family, and the hole in the road—join them together, and with the key thus found open a door you will probably tell me I should not go through.

Yousef and the hole

I have described the hole in the tarmac as much-photographed, and if there is one individual that stands out as protagonist in this drama it is the said variably-bereaved, twin-bearing, unconsolable Yousef. Joining Yousef to the hole, we find the answers to the above questions. Questions 1 and 2 are rhetorical and need no answer. Any military man would laugh at such incompetence.

Question 3 is a trick question; fortune played no part in this coïncidence. The White Helmets were there at precisely the time the hole appeared in the road because it was the White Helmets that made and decorated the hole in the road. As to their being there and making the hole at 6:30 am on 4th April…well, of course, that is preposterous! So long as the hole was there when it was needed for the photographers and reporters, it doesn’t matter when it was made. Why get up before dawn to do a job that can be done at any time?

Why then did they not ask themselves questions 1 and 2 before making the hole when they did and where they did, and not in some more populous and awake district? Well, first of all because they are morons, of course, as those who follow their fakeries know well; but you will have guessed from my preamble that I am going to say Yousef. And I am. Abdelhamid Yousef and other members of his extended family both in Idlib and in Reyhanlı—or at least in Turkey—have been lined up as victims-in-chief in this hoax. Dozens, nay scores, of Yousefs and Yousefs-in-law are to contract pinpoint pupils, to froth at the mouth, to gasp and groan, to lie prone and priapic on the summer concrete to be hosed and pummeled and thrown about, taking great care, however, not to vomit, urinate or empty their bowels in one massive movement as is the rule with common infidel sarin victims.

I said I would leave you to read Barnyard Annie’s NYT piece on your own, but the following excerpt really cannot be passed over:

At the hospital in Reyhanli, a small Turkish border town that took in many of the victims, the mourners gathered outside mostly came from just two extended families, Mr. Youssef’s and the Abu Amash family.

The families are connected by marriage and both come from Khan Sheikhoun, the village in rebel-held Idlib Province that residents said had been hit with chemical weapons earlier that morning.

“Just look at this!” Orwa Abu Amash, 33, said as he held up his phone. On the screen was a long WhatsApp message listing what he claimed were the names of 46 relatives who had died that day in Khan Sheikhoun.

See what I mean?

Now when you have a list of forty-six Abu Amashes in a Whatsapp message and however many Yousefs, you’re quite close to getting your quota of corpses without going outside the family and upsetting the peaceful inhabitants of the town, who have no inkling that a not-quite-white and not-quite-yellow winter fog, almost, but not entirely unlike sarin, has been hanging over their lives.

And where do all these abu Amashes and Yousefs dwell? Why! just up the road from the hole therein!!

Back to those questions. We have two more to answer. First 4: where are all the dead cats and dogs? Why just a goat and a bird of no genus? Answer: Sahloul has assured us any pair of unlike beasts will satisfy the OPCW. Then 5: Why no photos af the hundreds of victims round the hole? Well, curious inhabitants have already been asking for days why that damn hole hasn’t been macadamed, and how the hell it got there in the first place. What are they going to say if they take the dog out one morning and discover four hundred potential corpses lying flat on the ground in the vicinity of the hole. No, that would never do! We want as little fuss as possible. We can set a guard on the road to the common and the White Helmets HQ, and the whole show can go ahead out of sight of these prying busybodies.

To sum up, the hole in the road had to be close to the Yousef quarter because it was the well-connected and powerful Yousefs that were to die and suffer and tell their tales; but the drama could not be conveniently enacted in that location. It had to be enacted in places removed from the public gaze. As a result the nearest any victim in the videos is seen to the hole in the road is a mile and a quarter away on the common, and most of the action takes place within the walls of the White Helmets’ compound.

Here follows a rough outline, in no particular order, of the topics remaining to be covered

The hospitals—and SAMS, the Muslim Brotherhood dominated criminal ‘NGO’, ‘Syrian American Medical Society’

……

Sophie McNeill, Jamie Cummins, ABC Australia’s Lateline, and ❝Dr. Mamoun Morad❞—a wilful fraud perpetrated by Australia’s national broadcaster

……

Dr. Shajul Islam, the dyslexic jihadi, struck off the GMC register for life

……

A grand day (or two) out for all the jihadi journalists, photographers, ‘media activists’ and news agencies.

……

The OPCW—A shameful case of conspiracy, corruption, lies, blackmail and homicidal deceit; a now totally discredited and criminal organisation.

……

‘Human Rights Watch’—Ole Solvang and the Yousefs—a well-prepared and cynical conspiracy.

……

The physical properties of sarin.

……

The symptoms of sarin poisoning, and the absence thereof.

……

A tale of two (or three) families—a genuine and unspeakable atrocity within a preposterous fakery.

……

The UN Security Council—a travesty.

……

The pivotal rôle of Turkey and the Erdog in the hoax

……

A long list of individuals and organisations involved in the conspiracy.

……

The Khan SheikhunSarin Bomb Hoax

Here follows a rough outline, in no particular order, of the topics remaining to be covered

The Khan Sheikhun
Sarin Bomb Hoax