Opposition Access to Syrian CW Bomb M4000

October 6, 2019
last updates October 23

So for a year now, Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat research collective have been promoting a likely identification for weapon remnants linked to the sarin attacks at Khan Sheikhoun and Latamnah in 2017. After seeing an initial modeling, I previously conceded it may be (right: Higgins showing a modeling video - Postol-Higgins debate post). I still do, although there remains some room for doubt over the linking of all 2017 parts into one weapon - considering how little is known about an unclear number of models, it couldn't be certain which this is or isn't - And and of course if a model is known to them, a reasonable copy might be fabricated by anyone with the will and the capabilities. 

And of course being found there doesn't mean they are from the delivery weapon or fell from a Syrian jet. Those are suggested and possible, and just barely possible in this case). All the opposition's supporters could not get any jets to actually be above the town as two allegedly were. Somehow radar data was brought up this time and found arguably consistent - but the arguments needed prove the jets actually had a pretty good alibi, which is something we usually never learn about one way or the other. So how the M-4000 got there - let's say in a lucky radar gap - the opposition still lied about the sarin spread, going exactly upwind, not downwind or just wrong but exactly opposite of right. That's the most likely error to make, in fact, if one makes the common mistake of reading the direction from as direction to. There was just one sample, I think, taken from the area of alleged deaths, allegedly downwind - but it came back negative for sarin (Kobs). They coated the town in a too-massive fog they had to just ignore, and their supporters follow suit. They couldn't show where anyone actually died, maybe because they all died in a gas chamber up the road, and they were caught killing or at least wounding some child victims - never a good sign.

So some M-4000 scraps being found proves nothing. But depending how you look at it, it could suggest a few different things from a Syrian chemical strike (that really defied the odds besides lacking a rational motive, and lining up with some shady actions by locals), or an opposition effort to paint such a picture by planting scraps from another event here as part of their false-flag operation - if they only had access to such a weapon.

Bellingcat's new old image(s)
I like Charles Wood's summation: @Mare_Indicum, Sep 25:
"In a spectacular own goal, Higgins has 'disclosed' that Syrian terrorists have long held bomb parts that could be used to fake the Khan Sheikhoun sarin bombing.
That's not to say an M4000 was even used, just that the parts in the crater are 'consistent' with Higgin's bomb parts."

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019/09/24/the-first-images-of-the-type-of-chemical-bomb-used-in-syrias-sarin-attacks/
Here Bellingcat explains a new twist - they found a real-world example of the weapon (they think) seen on video. Previously there was no photographic images, just a crude low-resolution diagram. It was enough to float a possible ID in some detail, but nothing like seeing the real thing.

First video
Video title (translated) One of the gifts of unexploded MiGs, thank God
Uploaded April 16, 2013 by wesamabd1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3cDJLXf1Uw

This is a useful composite image Bellingcat made from the video that remains too panned-in for a good overall view. Video stamp is from Hejira al-Balad media office (more below on who got this M4000 bomb, by whatever means). But

Higgins concludes with some basis "it is possible to conclude that the bomb featured in the April 2013 video is a near perfect match to what Russia describes as an M4000 bomb." That was, again, in the schematic they showed last year, here for comparison. There are questions about how this all lines up with the schematics and with previous measurements, the spacing of the caps and suspension lugs, etc. (Qoppa999 with a good-seeming question) But we could consider this may not be a final or exact schematic, or the model could have been changed later, etc.

Update 10-23: After looking into this some days back, I can verify the mismatch and add some details, like the mismatch holding across the intact example seen in 2013 and the scraps linked to Latamnah in 2017. This bolsters an interesting question, but I had to add some reason to mute that suspicion; as noted above, the schematics are not necessarily gospel, so such a difference could mean nothing at all, or be a flaw in some rebel effort to make their own controlled copies of this uniquely damning weapon.

Second video
Excavating one of the unexploded rockets in Tishreen neighborhood of Damascus
noor alhak Mar 13, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_7Af8cIx7g
Damascus - Tishreen and Hafiriya neighborhood Information offfice (north Damascus, Qaboun-Barzeh area)
13/03/2014
One of the unexploded rockets was Assad's planes bombed civilians In al-Hafiriya area in Tishreen neighborhood, Damascus has been recovered from underground Bashar al-Assad's achievements in the Tishreen neighborhood of Damascus.

Covered and filled with mud, leaking reddish-brown water? A square hole was cut into its side near the rear, maybe just to attach a dragging rope? It's more dented than the other but pretty well intact. I wouldn't think it was air-dropped and came down the usual way (nose first), but perhaps. It looks more laterally flattened, as if it were lobbed (by a catapult?) and landed sideways after just a middling fall. Tail fins curl variously, and lack the connecting ring. Maybe it broke off. Note how the two fill ports (green circled) are on different planes, showing distortion there. Also there's no cylindrical fuze sticking out the nosecone as with the design and the other example. It seems unlikely that it broke off. Alternately, it was removed after excavation, or maybe it was never there.

A third example?
During my digging around, I found same people with the 2014 sighting had perhaps another back in 2013, on July 15. (Facebook) "The missile that didn't go off targeting the neighborhood with war aviation today." Just this still image is provided.

The tailfins look the same minus the ring. But then there's a ring-width torqued patch (top) where it would connect, and the accepted example found here in 2014 is also missing a ring. The terminal slope looks correct, and there's a protrusion - something I THINK most bombs don't have. Compared to the Bellingcat find and its spindle (it's apparently part of the "mixing arm" - halfway visible in the composite view above) this seems fatter relative to the gap between fins. (the 2014 example has no view clear enough to compare). That could be a variation, another similar model of chemical bomb, or another kind of bomb with an unusual nub out the back. Or just an illusion caused by the outer part being knocked off axis, as it seems to be? I'm not sure...

Or the second bomb first time around?
Actually, as Amin 2511 helps me see this might even be the same exact unit seen again in 2014, dug up after a long sleep in the dirt (the video doesn't specify that it was dropped recently). His images to show possible matches at the tailfins and the holes both have in the side, and a long bend or dent next to the hole.

The fins are hard to compare but seem to have consistent bends. But the hole in the side that both have - rotated, slightly contrast-enhanced, put side-by-side, it's hard to be sure they match, but far harder to be sure they don't. Consider they're seen at different angles so they would look even more similar seen at the same. Is it 100% similar? Maybe not, but close. And if the bomb had a square hole cut in it at impact time while it was still buried, nearly a year before it was finally excavated, why? We can see it's later used for attaching a dragging rope. Was it dragged the same way into a pre-existing crater to bury? There are also questions about whether such a bomb could cause that size of a crater...

<Add 10/21-23>: for good measure I re-visited the fins as first noted by Amin. He traced parts of two fin edges with red dots, which I show again at right, with changes: here his red dots are continued with a few orange ones for the full curve until that fin becomes invisible under the ropes. And the rest of the dots tracing the other fin are painted over in yellow. Furthermore, I've added numbers to the visible fins in lime green, for reference purposes. So he marked out fins 2 and 3, with the line for the latter (here in yellow)  stopping short, I think, to mark the app. span we can compare in the earlier view - the rest disappears into the dark and/or the dirt).

The numbering is from the April 2013 view, shown again at right; as just seen above, fin 1 doesn't even look a fin, but in 2013 it's the one sticking straight up with its sharp edge seeming notched where the support ring had anchored (traced above in purple. This fin is little help in establishing a match. It all but has to be the same thing, but seen in 2014 it's severely flattened (besides rusted and dirt-caked). That's no big mystery - if they left this thing buried so for eight months, with that fin 1 sticking out like a razor blade, it's likely someone would finally come over with a hammer and whack it down flatter. Alternately, it was only flattened in the move, or some mix. Deformations can be added to an old remnant, they just can't be removed (except by the most bizarre of conspiracies).

Fin 1 is a slight problem, but then again … notice above from the shadow across the fin (the 1 is sitting in it) there must be a significant distortion here,  not just a notch. It appears the sharp bend in the metal there points towards the camera, but due to foreshortening, it's hard to say how extreme it is.  Then seeing it from the other side ... I'm not certain these are the right lines to trace in the same purple, but it seems to show a single curve 'til near the end, where there's a sudden and extreme break and bend, in an upward direction - which would be the same direction as the noted distortion on fin 1 earlier. Therefore, likely match.

Fin 4 is barely seen from two views (both right above) that don't clearly match, but aren't clear enough to mismatch either. And fin 3 with is consistent between views, to the extent it's visible in 2013 (not great, seems largely buried).

Fin 2 is the clincher. Just tracing the two contours using the clear back edge and less clearly, a line along the crest of the strongly curved portion. These rough lines - simple 2D results - are scaled and rotated closer to line-up and compare in the corner here, with no further effort to skew, perspective, or 3D model it. But I suspect a good modeling would prove the shapes are identical.

An identically deformed fin, another with matching deformities despite changes, another
totally consistent and one unclear - between one or two units that have identical square holes cut into identically wrinkled metal of the payload tank. So many extreme similarities emerge on 2 intact weapons not just on Earth at any time, but in the Tishreen area of Damascus within the same 8 month span, where the former example is half-buried and the latter one looks half-buried for around the elapsed 8 months. At this point, it's plain moronic to deny that this is the same thing seen twice. But just what that means is another story...
<end add>

Damage considerations
It's been seen twice at least, neither time exploded, and possibly seen other times exploded and it went unnoticed. Or it was re-purposed for another event and called a non-explosive chemical strike.

The perfect match Bellingcat found is remarkable, like two modeled copies right from the factory or rendering program, prior to any simulated damage or actual use. Bellingcat show off this fact in one their graphics, but it's actually a problem. Only some minor flattening of sections of the tailfin ring was required. Compare the tailfin damage - the worst there is - to that on the separated tail assembly linked to the Latamnah sarin attack - arguably the least damaged part in that case.

Oops. Is that why we never heard about this attempted sarin attack? Because they realized it made too little sense for something of that scale? Higgins and Bellingcat conclude these new-old example images show bombs had high explosives, not sarin inside. And that could be. In fact I think the 2017 example(s) look too blown up to be anything other than one or two of those HE-re-purposed M4000s that DID detonate, besides landing after a long fall. But allegedly they both fell, and the only difference is the one had its small CW dispersal charge go off while the other had nothing triggered.

I asked about this in the Bellingcat comments section, thinking an airdrop was presumed, since that was the opposition claim. My question was eventually answered by someone called "Servus" and seeming to speak for Bellingcat: "for the 2013 video, there is apparently little information about it, the article says: ´The video describes the bomb as an unexploded munition, but provides little information to what the munition actually is. It does not say it has been airdropped. As a layman I would refrain from any speculations."

But it's not speculation. The video people know more about the allegations than anyone, and the title says it’s a “أحد هدايا طائرات الميغ” – “ahd hadaya tayirat almigh” – that didn’t explode: going word-by-word, that translates “One of the gifts of the aircraft (mig or meg, and I pick MIG).” There are not many ways for a MIG jet to deliver such a “gift” except by dropping it as a bomb.

Perhaps it just means a bomb, meant to be delivered by Mig, but instead found in some depot. But they thank god it didn't explode - after their rough handling, dropping in the mud and denting the tail? No, the implication is that this was a bomb that had been dropped and was meant to detonate, and that's how they got it. God stepped in and prevented its going off, because he wanted to save a few lives, and/or because he wanted them to have this thing intact.

So … it's clear they allege an airdrop, but that means this minimal damage is from that, and that seems hard to accept. Usually Bellingcat takes these claims at face value. But when they present such a logical problem, suddenly it's "speculation" to accept what they say. Yet no one wants to specify what the other options are, let alone assign likelihoods. Why couldn’t the Islamist activists tell us the true story of how they got it? The options are, at least:

– they seized it somewhere, then dented it and dropped it in the mud to look sort-of airdropped.
– made in their own workshops to match the known design, then gave it the same treatment
– in an airdrop like they said, but no one now seems to buy that, unless someone made a special case?

As a layman I wouldn't presume to have a complete list of options, but no others pop to mind. As I threatened to do, I have to paraphrase the relative silence of Higgins and Bellingcat as saying "whatever it takes to accept the opposition's evidence, and craft a narrative blaming Assad - even if we can't figure out just what that takes and so … who knows, it must add up somehow."

Details and context 
Said weapon was never reported in a successful CW attack, but the first sighting are right in the span of very active sarin allegations. There were- dozens in the spring of 2013, most of them low-profile non-fatal repeated incidents in nearby Jobar.

The April 16 sighting ame just three days after an attack at Sheikh Maqsoud, Aleppo, using a Nusra-linked grenade just after Nusra overran the area, and a regime helicopter was blamed. Sarin was reported bu unconfirmed, but then confirmed in another incident using the same grenades 2 days later. 4 initial deaths of women and children sounded like the total death toll in Sheikh Maqsoud, but ten men were quietly listed as dying as well.

I noted that came after a pause from March 19 as Syria struggled to have that day's attack in Khan al-Assal investigated - only once the Western powers maneuvered Damascus into declining a probe on 6 April, over the next days UK's Porton Down laboratory announced sarin had probably turned up somewhere, then that Aleppo attack event was called in April 13, and then FWIW this sarin bomb too-perfect example was in rebel hands the 16th, images were seeded, but not for any immediate purpose one can see. (see here)

The later find in 2014 is in the span of chlorine-related allegations. But then again, there were some notably deadly CW attacks reported in the Douma-Harasta area (adjascent) on at least March 2 and March 28 (see red flag over the red line). The latter is said to kill 7 people, which would be record-breaking for a non-Douma chlorine attack (that is, it maybe wasn't chlorine, which kills 0-4 usually, killed 6 people twice, and then 43-187 at Douma in 2018, so this would be a distant second-place). The munition was shown right between those events, on the 13th. And if it was first seen in July, 2013, that's also sarin time - in between some reported attacks between May and July in nearby Adra.

So there's a possible relevance to them coming up with sarin phases, but it's not totally clear or conclusive, and of course they were never linked to those events in any statements. They are in a sarin bomb by design, but these might be re-purposed for explosives use as some M4000s reportedly were.

where the sightings happened and who told us the story:
None of this proves anything about the allegations, but the sources involved are clearly Islamists of a pretty extreme variety. Thus they might play along with the kind of sectarian kidnapping and mass-murder and false-flag deception as groups like their allies Jabhat al-Nusra and Liwa/Jaish al-Islam.

Apr 16, 2013 at Hajjira al-Balad ( حجيرة البلد ) (On Wikimapia). It's right next to large Shi'ite suburb Sayyida Zaynab, the biggest concentration of mainline Shi'ites you'll find in Syria. This seems to be well outside the area under control of Liwa al-Islam, but this media outlet anyway seems allied with them.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC37AOBZn5OiAI-M8x271mdg
Channel for the Information Office in the Hujeirat Al-Damad Al-Samad Resilient
videos stamped by themselves (Hajjera al-Balad LOC) by, Liwa al-Islam, and a "Media Center in and around Sayeda Zeinab (S.Z.M.C.)"

LOC.Hajjira.Al.Balad Facebook page removed but a Twitter account is active (10-16-13 they still hope for "the victory of the Sunnis") and points to a later FB page LO.Hajjira.Al.Balad where one can find at least an October 2013 message saying in part:
"Mujahideen who are able to victory and you are asleep, and God, we will hold you accountable on the day of reckoning before our enemies from the Nasiriyah (Alawites) and hateful Shiites, they understood that they are our enemies in religion and belief, but you are our brothers in religion and faith … Special international and Syrian relief organizations, where are you from what is happening in the besieged south of Damascus, especially now in the country and Buwayda? (an area just south of Hajjira).

And 30 Sept. 2013 "Syrian Islamic Liberation Front: Brigade of Islam (Liwa al-Islam) The finest footage of storming in the battle of submission to the Almighty with the participation of Sheikh Mohammed Zahran (Alloush)."

On Facebook, a 1-27-14 video post relates a "phone call between a member of the free army and the brother of one of the shabiha (meaning NDF or just Alawite, or what?) who was previously killed during battles and getting his phone." Unclear what's said, but it may be cruel and sectarian.

The Other one(s): Tishreen or "Dignity" district: 
The 2014 sighting (and the possible other 2013 sighting) was in - or was covered by people from - a "Teshreen neighborhood" of Damascus. Starting near the other location, a place of just that name appears on the other edge of the same Sayida Zainab (Wikimapia), about 3 km east of Hejira al-Balad. However, frequent mentions of Barzeh and Qaboun and so on suggest it's the larger Tishreen neighborhood in the northeast of Damascus, being a good part of the  Qaboun district, next to Barzeh orchards. (Wikimapia)

From the FB pages below: "To the members of the Commission and the Council to discuss the proposal to amend and integrate the Tishreen neighborhood and the neighborhood of al-Hafiriya and Mashrouh Avenue ( شارع المشروح ) and extends between Barzeh district and Qaboun under the name of the neighborhood of dignity (Hay al-Karama - ي الكرامة )." 3-22-13 Hafiriya ( الحفيرية  ) doesn't appear that I can find, but the mentioned Mashrouq and Hafiz labels appear on locales mainly around the red circle here.

Teshreen media office - page starting early May, 2013.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/AlmktbAlalamyLhyTshrynWAlhfyryt/about/?ref=page_internal
And a previous page that stops where the other starts, after starting just a few months earlier.
https://www.facebook.com/LocalCouncilHaveriaa
"The local council responsible for managing and organizing the affairs of Al-Hafiriya, Tishreen and Al-Mashrouh Street in Damascus." And this is their chosen imagery at the first site to sum up what this "dignity" thing is about - a Shihada flag as used by Liwa al-Islam and Jabhat al-Nusra:

They posted the oft-misrepresented Ghouta re-enactment video from Douma on Sept. 13. (it's shown as training to fake a CW attack, but doesn't appear like any training to me - just a lame and ill-advised re-enactment).

9-24-13: "God bless you" starts off a joint statement from 13 prominent Islamist groups, excluding only Islamic State (beginning of their rift with the rest). "These forces and factions call upon all military and civilian actors to unite within a clear Islamic framework that is based on the capacity of Islam, based on Sharia Arbitration and making it the only source of legislation," and they agree in rejecting the foreign-backed and non-Islamist Syrian National Council. The document with signatures is shown. Among those agreeing are: Jabhat Al Nusra - Ahrar al-Sham - Liwa al-Islam - ktayb nur aldiyn alzanki (child beheaders).

On the formation of Jaish al-Islam
29\9\2013 Urgent - celebrating the planned announcement of a ((Army of Islam)) or Jaish al-Islam, fusing Liwa (brigade of) Al-Islam and several other Islamic Front members into a new sub-coalition. Tishreen media office expressed hopes that "this army will be the biggest response to the plot of the Arabs and the west in cooperation with their clients from the coalition and the staff... And I ask God that this army is the core of the Islamic State Army on the land of sham." These folks think the West and "the Arabs" are against them, along with Iran, Russia, the Shi'ites, Alawites, and Satan himself. Of course it would be that way to people like this. Only God has their back as they battle the whole world.