Updated April 13, 2013 One witness said he smelled chlorine. Another remembered the scent of rotting garbage. There were photos of dead farm animals in a yard, and video footage of survivors struggling to breathe. But of the 31 casualties of what the Syrian government has labeled the opposition's first chemical weapons attack, on March 19, there is no list of names of the deceased and no footage of coffins that can be directly attributed to the incident. Immediately following the alleged attack, the Syrian government demanded an international investigation, and the U.N. Security Council obliged, scrambling a team with the assistance of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Nearly a month after the attack, that team is twiddling its thumbs in Cyprus, waiting for a green light to enter Syria even as the evidence, whatever is left of it, evaporates into thin air. (MORE: The mystery behind a chemical weapons attack in Syria.) Discussions on the proposed investigation between the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the U.N. remain deadlocked. The Syrian government requested only an inquest into the one attack on a pro-regime village just outside of Aleppo last month. The rebels, too, want an investigation. They hold that they were framed by the government, and believe that an international investigation will exonerate them. But they have also raised the issue of two other alleged chemical weapons attacks, one in Damascus in March and another in Homs in December. Both the rebels and the regime have traded accusations over all three events. The U.N., responding to pressure from France and the U.K., insists that the investigators have access to all three sites, something the Syrian government is refusing to grant upfront. According to Reuters, an April 6 letter from Syria's foreign minister to the UN.. said that access to Homs would be granted only after the investigators went to Aleppo, and then only once the mission's "honesty and neutrality and the credibility of its work away from politicization" was ascertained. The U.N. is unlikely(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=81403&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin