France issues arrest warrant for Syria’s President Assad – source.

According to a court source on Wednesday, French judges have issued arrest warrants for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, and two other top officials in connection with the use of prohibited chemical weapons against people in Syria.

The allegations of involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity included in the arrest warrants stem from a criminal investigation into chemical strikes that occurred in August 2013 in the Eastern Ghouta area and the town of Douma, killing over a thousand people.

For the Syrian president, whose forces reacted to protests that started in 2011 with a ruthless crackdown that U.N. investigators have warned amounted to war crimes, this is the first international arrest warrant that has been issued.

Lawyer Mazen Darwish founded the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the lawsuit in France.

According to Darwish, they are also the first foreign arrest warrants issued about the chemical weapons assault in Ghouta. Although Syria disputes the use of chemical weapons, a prior joint investigation by the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons discovered that the Syrian government had used chlorine as a weapon on many occasions and had attacked in April 2017 with the nerve agent sarin.

The information ministry and the Syrian presidency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As commander of the armed forces, the president’s consent would be required. “The president is responsible for many crimes in Syria, but with this type of weapon in particular—sarin gas—it’s impossible to jump over the gap in terms of his involvement,” Darwish told Reuters.

Since incumbent heads of state are usually immune from prosecution, arrest warrants for them are uncommon. However, when a head of state is charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, international law makes an exemption to that immunity.

Two arrest warrants are pending from the International Criminal Court against heads of state: one is for Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and the other is for Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan.

After the conflict started in 2011, Assad made a few infrequent trips to Russia and Iran but otherwise remained isolated from the majority of countries in the region and the rest of the world for more than ten years.

Following last year’s devastating earthquake in Syria, his visit to the United Arab Emirates last year marked a warming in relations and sparked a diplomatic frenzy.

Since then, he has visited China and been greeted with open arms upon his return to the Arab League.

The people who received warrants were Bassam al-Hassan, the chief of security and liaison officer, and Ghassam Abbas, the director of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC). This organization started Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Maher, the brother of Assad, was considered guilty since he led the Fourth Armored Division.

Judges have issued eleven arrest warrants for crimes committed by Syrian authorities from the Paris Tribunal’s Crimes Against Humanity team.

French judges wanted two former defense ministers in October in connection with a bombing in 2017 that killed a French-Syrian man at his Daraa residence.