It blows the contentions that the rebels could or would have made the weapons considering the capital and logistics involved. It firmly rebuts the contention on the range of the munitions.
It firmly links the munitions known to have been used in the attack to the regime. It puts the regime forces firmly in position from where the attacks came. It demonstrates an overall military campaign in the area under question.
Could one of the major rebel factions obtained the munition and the artillery and fired it on their own people? Anything is possible I guess but there is very little proof of it and much of it is not corroborated.by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
"The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons," Kaszeta said. "Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we're looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people -- not just one al Qaeda member -- needed to produce this amount of material?"
He went on to add: "We have to apply a simple logic test here. Who is more likely to have done the deed? The regime, which has confessed to CW [chemical weapon] production facilities and has declared a stockpile of precursors that match the Aug. 21 chemistry very well?… Or persons unknown, with their alleged mystery factory, with no actual location, no trace of either supply chain or waste stream, no known employees, and far better things to do with the required amount of money?"
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