DISINFO: UN allegations of Russian war crimes in Syria are unfounded and biased, based on a flawed investigation
SUMMARY
Russia didn’t commit any war crime in Syria, contrary to what is stated in the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Arab country published on March 2, 2020. The allegations of war crimes were made immediately after terrorists started their offensive against Syrian troops in Idlib, so no committee may get reliable information on what was going on on the ground. The report is unilateral, not objective and terrorist actions are not taken into account.
RESPONSE
The allegations are false. The report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic is based on evidence available, including witness testimonies, video footage, data imagery as well as reports by flight spotters, flight communication intercepts and early warning observation reports, enough for the body to conclude that there was reasonable grounds to believe that a Russian aircraft participated in two episodes tantamount to war crimes (p.6). In both incidents, the Russian Air Force did not direct the attacks at a specific military objective, amounting to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas. The report also addresses human rights violations by terrorist groups -describing them as such- from the very beginning of the document, in the third paragraph of the introductory summary, as well as the actions of the Turkish and Syrian governmental armies, so the claim of bias is unfounded. This is part of a recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Russia or its allies always being falsely accused of war crimes and international law violations. You can see many other examples in our database, such as allegations that the Russian army doesn’t deliberately target civilians, unlike the US, or that Amnesty International is an ideological tool of US security services, Russia’s insistence on an alleged lack of interest in finding the truth in the Skripal and Litvinenko cases or in the downing of the MH17 flight, or claims about the anti-Russian bias of the OPCW, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the PACE, Ukraine’s national DNA or the West in general.