Ghouta Placed Impact #8: The Dead Pool

Ghouta Chemical Massacre(s) : Firing Directions : Placed Impact #8: The Dead Pool

March 28, 2021

updates April 6

Mapping the Spot

I recently started a discussion on Twitter regarding an interesting video report made by Al-Jazeera, posted Nov. 12, 2013. I didn't find a written report to go with it, in English or Arabic. So I've been piecing together what the Arabic video says and, especially, what it shows - several locations, including at least two with otherwise unplaced "volcano" rockets, analyzed by on-site by well-equipped people who would provide estimated trajectories that might even be accurate.

As I had hoped, someone with more spark made good use of the visuals. Chris Kabusk located this half of their unique rocket impacts from the scene at 5:47 in the video, as shown at right. Note reference map is flipped south up in this. Distinct building ahead (to the south), aqua-blue line marks a wall with trees behind, a roof marked yellow on the left, open space beneath that, open space between, and a guy's leg. If you were the yellow pin on his map, that would be your view. The red line to off-frame is Kabusk's rocket trajectory estimate. We'll come back to trajectory.

I agreed to his detail matches and added a few more (below, also with map flipped south, but exactly 180). Notably the open pavement with railing, a lip, then some recess to match the satellite view of a large, drained swimming pool. The rocket apparently hit a roofed area behind us there,  just east of the pool's shallow north end. Finally, looking northeast from the impact hole, a matching set of distinctive buildings (purple outline, blue for balconies/windows) further cements the match. Also another view out the impact hole, unclear direction, fills an empty space I had.

Coordinates: 33.312049° 36.213243°

This was (or just included) a big, seemingly public swimming pool until it was drained, app. in late 2012. On August 23, 2013, there's a big hole in the roof at the red arrow that wasn't there before but remains after. That must be the impact point for the rocket.

This location is roughly where the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) had somewhere pegged as impact #5 - I should to track down where I ever got that. As I re-plotted them anyway, they've usually been close but inexact. Human Rights Watch also has inexact or unverified plottings, including an impact reported here - #6 as assigned, on the updated map at right. Green numbers for verified by us = a group including me, as I took note and agreed, by which this dead pool impact is #8.

Impact Analysis

April 6 note: This goes on a bit, and then had further work and final-for-now estimates at the end.

The rocket was seen in an odd tiled room with  a checkered wall and railing. It's not another part of that deck area, nor down in the pool, and should be near that punctured roof, having a rocket there and much of the roof in the wrong place. Here is Al-Jazeera's investigator looking down at the rocket near that wall. He's also near a slanting metal bar that bisects his body in our view.

The frame below is roughly his view there, looking right down that same bar at the rocket (lime outline) in its  trench with its implied trajectory (red) relative to that checkered wall with its base now marked yellow. 

In the big detail-matching graphic above, a view to the northeast has afternoon sun lighting up up both faces of those matching buildings marked in purple. To be lit in these afternoon views, this checkered wall must face roughly south or west, besides avoid all the complex shadows. If it faced south, the trajectory is from the E-SE, which is unknown. If west, then it's from the north-northwest. which there's plenty of precedent for. So it must be the eastern (west-facing) wall. Some more complex sunlight details suggest the same. Michael Kobs agrees: "I think, in order to catch some late sun light the rocket motor should be along the yellow dotted wall" (yellow solid line here). And he suggests not reading final angle too literally, as the rocket might "bounce" between walls and so on.

Important point: after it passes the roofed area, views on hand aren't clear if it passed through another wall or door or nothing before entering this room we see. So far I think it's all open space, only metal roof torn through. All debris is sheeting, insulation, ceiling panels and bars, a few pipes, wires in tubing - hardly a single brick or any concrete rubble. I think this is still the right call.

By satellite views, such walls here run 345/165° for north-south. There is some foreshortening, but the angle of the red line I traced above seems like roughly 20-25 degrees from parallel. That would mean a trajectory somewhere around 135-125° (reverse azimuth 315-325) - pretty well due northwest.  Michael Kobs or someone may offer a better reading on this in time.

So it looks like it came in close to parallel to this wall, or mostly from the north. But it did punch a hole in the roof some distance west of here. That seems to require a different trajectory at that point, one aimed a bit more into the wall and less along it. 

The rocket changing direction like that, to me, seems quite plausible; on impact, it would lose much force into that spot, bursting the tile up to the wall. Then it might find more resistance near the wall that would deflect it to the right. In the image above, see how a whole span of tile to the left was ground up, compared to a clean scrape on the right. The weak tile would give for a while before stopping the spent tube, letting that new angle get really etched in. That red arrow above should probably curve a bit to reflect the reality.  

Here's another view: red damage starts sharp, angled as if into the wall - the damage that way continues, but wider than it should, as the other side keeps going, curving towards the camera. And the curved tube at the front shows its own resistance curve. That will be partly vertical difference, and partly this curved trench effect, whatever its current rotation,

Other things aimed into the wall, coming from the west: a number of ... explosive fragments? That might raise questions I've already been asking. Either way, it needs to factor in. These mostly uniform chips span the whole west wall, with some heavy clustering north at the entrance doors, and many lighter ones clustered south. See here and further below, marked with orange shapes and dots (and gold dots for poss. lighter chips).

This wall runs for some 10-11m as visible from above. The rocket is 1.34m long to start, the trench a bit longer, so close to what I drew here.  From punched roof to near-the-wall, it had to travel 5-10 meters east to southeast, depending on the heading - which must have been different from the angle of that trench. Variables I tried to account for here: exact size and scale of the area, skewed roofline in the satellite view, uncertain center of first contact with that roof, any mild deflection then, and slightly unclear impact point with the ground where the trench begins. Each of these might be - or seems to be - a little bit off in my modeling here, but good enough for this exercise. 

Considering all those details, the original angle is hard to say for sure. A whole lot of lower angles for the roof-to-ground path are possible, but it shouldn't be very far from the final ~320. So I focused on the upper end, tracing a line with plenty of north origin. An angle like 308 or 311 seems plausible at start, but not much higher. 

At 308 it hits northeast of center in that impact zone, would deflect only a tiny bit, and needs only this 306 to land where it did. If we passed it through another spot more south or west, we'd need a lower angle to land where it did, and thus a greater deflection in the end. But I should have maybe de-skewed the roof a bit more to the left, and/or had floor impact a hair closer to the wall, so a bit smaller angle like 304/305?  

I consider these factors squeeze us to conclude an original reverse azimuth between 300 and 313°, trajectory 120-133. All considered and by what they report, Al-Jazeera's confident 307°/127° - if it even referred to this spot - might be a best center, Margin of error? +/- 3° might be reasonable.

April 6: I measured the space better - still ambiguous at the north end, but seemingly smaller - 4.8m x 8.4m - doorway 1.5m, yellow-marked wall 6.9m. I tried a tile-based measure for impact spot, that at first went poorly - taking the man's estimated height 1.75m and found tiles 0.5m wide fit and made sense. But the impact looked too close to the doors, and was wrong - he was too much closer to the camera to compare like that - the tiles were much bigger. 

Then I used the rocket motor/tube, given as 155 cm per HRW, from Higgins. That made the tiles about 80cm wide and put impact 5.6m from the doors, almost in the roofed area.  The better result is shown here: we can say a rough minimum and maximum angles. A best fit hard to call except closer to the maximum, with 307 looking as good as anything, and already offered. We could add a 5 degree give-or-take to that as a likely center from the roof. At the roof there would also be deflection - say +/- 3° or 5° if it hit a concrete edge. That's +/-10 all told - not very specific. I favor a middle 307 to the roof, and see a small deflection, to the right making more sense, so a similar and likely lower angle from the roof back to launcher. 

And then I found that was wrong - 155cm motor was not clearly measured, I guess deduced from the larger HE variant. The UN-OPCW give a more reliable 134cm for the same - 86% the size I used.

that makes the the tiles 70, maybe 75cm, so the same 7 tiles over is 35-70 cm closer to the doors than shown. That's not worth re-doing that last graphic, but could allow maybe a degree less for reverse azimuth (312 max) and would force the 307 closer to that upper end. Also I got a better final resting angle for the tube - only 15° from parallel to the wall, worsening the case for the lower angles. (but not as much as the 8 shown - it angles ~20cm closer to the wall over 134cm, not over 155cm)

Analysis back in context:

It seems Al-Jazeera's findings were of a second government-run firing spot. As Amin25 helped me understand the narration and visuals, and as I follow their lines on the map (as blur-matchingly exact as possible) on Google Maps, this is their case: they set a pin called "Zamalka" used to measure all impacts from. The spot corresponds to no impacts, exactly, but is close to both "impact site 5" and closer to an unseen "LCC1," by far the nearest one to their suspected launch spots. Note how much further out the rest of them range. (this predates finding #8 - that dot is still red in this picture)

Next, they presume the UN-OPCW's 285° - read as running to the 104th brigade base on Mt. Qassioun 9.6 km away - was correct in angle and implications for the "Assad regime." That's not to their credit, nor is it a surprise. Oddly, they map that here as running about 280 to the actual peak of Mt. Qassioun, a ways south of where the UN-OPCW had incorrectly pointed. Their tweaked triangle suggests this as just over 5km out (barely into that white span to 10km), but it's nearly 7.2 km, as I measure it, to the matching features on Google Maps. Here's their fancy map with my measures traced on, for this and the rest. Feel free to double check me here.

It doesn't seem they found any angles to confirm the UN-OPCW one they defer to. They did finds a similar 290, but then plot 285 as 280, as if divorcing them. Their other angle, 307, is no fit. And they only mention identifying a new firing direction pointing to a second attack vector. Maybe just the one impact does that, while the 290 confirms the other line?

Either way, they clearly identify the Syrian Scientific Research Center (SSRC, or CERS in French) at Barzeh, just under 5km distant. This is the same one bombed by Donald Trump in 2018 over bogus sarin claims, just weeks after it was cleared - by the biased OPCW - of producing any such thing (CBS). No one even mentioned it was also a site used in 2013 for military attacks with giant sarin-filled rockets, as suggested here by Al-Jazeera.

First, range: they mean here that 330mm volcano rockets were fired from both spots and landed in Zamalka. This has been universally regarded as nonsense almost since this video came out. Foreshadowing: they're proud to show a max 10km range for the shells that hit Moadamiya as they animate 9.5km ... actually 8.6km here. They do the same animation for the volcanos that hit Zamalka, but can't offer a range to support this 9.6km flight. Instead as we've seen, they moved the launch spot to 7.2 km out on a different bearing, then mapped it to look like ~6km, and paired it with another launch from just under 5km. 

 

Everyone knows aerodynamic reality limits these to 2, maybe 2.5km range, not 4.9, or 7.2, or 9.6 km. However, tracing Al-Jazeera's lines to a plausible 2.25km or so, even from that arbitrary dot, is a bit useful. We'll come right back to that.

Next, from the "Zamalka" pin, neither green line points towards SSRC, let alone has any hope of reaching it. It's 316/317° from that spot. But spots vary, and their 307° might originate at this dead pool. However, from the pool impact, it's about 315 degrees to SSRC, not 307. 

They never did map this out, but now we can. In fact I already did it, roughly, a couple weeks ago. Recently we identified the likely firing spot best indicated by out 7 trajectories. That plus freshly burned grass pointed right to a field matching the one in which the "Liwa al-Islam volcano videos" were filmed. I decided to try tracing Al-Jazeera's angles from there, in a quick take. 307 seemed to trace out to just a bit west of LCC5 - not as exactly as the 290 pointed to HRW9, but close enough to suggest we really had the basic spot. Now it seems that LCC5 dot was set a bit east of the true impact, added here as "pool," which splits the difference and suggests maybe ~306 is better in the end. 

Or put the other way - the angle they give from here points - more or less - right to that field that was NOT under regime control, is within actual range, at the intersection of 8 trajectories now, was freshly burned, and probably hosted that video of these rockets being fired. As if we needed more evidence at this point. 

So 307, or 306. Or even lower? Yeah - I had placed the black circle pretty crudely too. Re-measuring it now with both ends pinned more exactly, I get about 305.5° from where my green line had ended to the "exact approximate" launcher spot - not the 307 I meant. And  from the impacted roof by the pool to our possible launcher is just one degree less, 304.5° (almost zero difference between hitting here vs. here on that roof, more possible variation at the launcher end).  Maybe 307 just wasn't that exact?

FWIW Distance: 1.989 km from that suspect field. Long range = shallow landing, likely enough to travel ~10m between roof and floor.