Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Mate.

Wanted to give you an update on what's been happening recently with the OPCW's Syria

cover-up scandal. As you know, probably we've covered this exhaustively at the Grey Zone.

I think it's one of the most important stories in the world. It gets almost

no attention in the Western media. I think that's a scandal in itself, as I've said many times.

And we're going to continue to cover it. And we're going to continue to try to break the sound

barrier around it. And so there are new developments to report. Let me just recap

the story quickly for anybody who might not be aware of it. In April 2018, Syria was accused of

committing a chemical weapons attack in the town of Duma. A week later, the U.S., Britain and

France bombed Syria in purported retaliation.

About a year after that, in March 2019, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical

Weapons, the OPCW, put out a report that seemed to support the official U.S. line

that the Syrian government was guilty of a chlorine weapons attack.

But then a series of leaks began to emerge from inside the OPCW,

showing that the OPCW inspectors on the ground

had reached a far different conclusion than what their superiors said publicly

and put out in their final report.

And the evidence that the inspectors collected on the ground in Duma

did not support the narrative that the Syrian government was guilty of a chemical weapons attack.

And in fact, some evidence pointed to this being staged on the ground

by the militants who controlled Duma at the time,

a extremist militia named J. Shal Islam, which would make sense because from a point of view of

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