Previously the watchdog could only say whether attacks had been carried out, and not who was responsible. The team was set up in 2018 under Western pressure to identify the perpetrators of attacks. A report in April by a new investigations team at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found the Syrian air force used sarin gas and chlorine on the village of Lataminah in March 2017. Western countries pushed members of the global chemical weapons watchdog Tuesday to formally condemn Syria after a probe explicitly blamed Damascus for nerve gas attacks for the first time.
