Chemical weapons 101: Six facts about sarin and Syria’s stockpile

Bashar Assad almost certainly crossed a 'red line' by using sarin or some other chemical weapon against his own people, President Obama said in April. The casualty toll from the latest suspected use suggests sarin henceforth will be associated with Syria and Mr. Assad. 

4. When has sarin been used as a chemical weapon?

A decade before Tokyo’s Subway Sarin Incident, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein used sarin against Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war – and in 1988 as part of the cocktail of chemical weapons he unleashed against the Kurdish population of Halabja in northern Iraq. About 5,000 people were killed.

In 2004, Iraqi insurgents fired a shell containing precursors for sarin against a US military convoy. Two US soldiers were treated for symptoms of sarin exposure, but the exploded shell released only a small amount of sarin, perhaps because the chemicals were old or simply because the chemicals failed to mix inside the spinning shell as intended.

4 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.