PARIS — Two dozen countries agreed Tuesday to push for sanctions against perpetrators of chemical attacks in Syria, with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying Russia “ultimately bears responsibility” for such strikes.

Twenty-four nations approved a new “partnership against impunity” for the use of chemical weapons, just a day after reports they were used in an attack that sickened 21 people in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta, which Tillerson said was suspected to involve chlorine.

“Whoever conducted the attacks, Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims in East Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons since Russia became involved in Syria,” Tillerson said after the international meeting in Paris, and ahead of further talks with ministers from several countries on ending the conflict.

“There is simply no denying that Russia, by shielding its Syrian ally, has breached its commitments to the US as a framework guarantor” overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, as agreed in September 2013, he added.

Despite its pledge to destroy such weapons, the Syrian regime has been repeatedly accused of staging chemical attacks, with the United Nations (UN) among those blaming it for an April 2017 sarin gas attack on the opposition-held village of Khan Sheikhun which left scores dead.

There have been at least 130 separate chemical weapons attacks in Syria since 2012, according to French estimates, with the Islamic State group also accused of using mustard gas in Syria and Iraq.

‘BARE MINIMUM’
Russia twice used its UN veto in November to block an extension of an international expert inquiry into chemical attacks in Syria, to the consternation of Western powers.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia Tuesday rejected Tillerson’s accusations and instead called for a “truly impartial” international investigation of the chemical attacks.

Moscow, backed by Iran and Turkey, has organized talks in the Russian city of Sochi next week aimed at finding a resolution to the brutal and multifaceted civil war.

Those efforts are running parallel to talks overseen by the UN, with the latest round due in Vienna on Thursday and Friday.

The talks have so far failed to make progress in ending a war that has left more than 340,000 people dead.

Tillerson said that “Russia’s failure to resolve the chemical weapons issue in Syria calls into question its relevance to the resolution of the overall crisis.”

“At a bare minimum, Russia must stop vetoing, or at the very least abstain, from future Security Council votes on this issue,” he said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, 24 out of 29 countries attending committed to sharing information and compiling a list of individuals implicated in the use of chemical weapons in Syria and beyond.

These could then be hit with sanctions such as asset freezes and entry bans as well as criminal proceedings at the national level.

Ahead of the meeting France announced asset freezes against 25 Syrian companies and executives, as well as French, Lebanese and Chinese businesses accused of aiding regime use of chemical weapons.

“The criminals who take the responsibility for using and developing these barbaric weapons must know that they will not go unpunished,” said French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who chaired Tuesday’s meeting.

“The current situation cannot continue.”

‘WORST HUMANITARIAN CRISES’
Tillerson, Le Drian and Britain’s Boris Johnson afterwards held a closed-door meeting on Syria with the Saudi and Jordanian foreign ministers.

They discussed how best to “provide backing and some concrete reinforcement for UN efforts to advance the political process in Geneva, constitutional reform and the preparation for the holding of elections,” ahead of a series of meetings on Syria, a senior US State Department official said, warning that “it’s going to take time.”

Johnson later hosted his US, Saudi Arabian and UAE counterparts at the British Embassy to discuss the Yemen conflict in a whirlwind of Middle Eastern diplomacy.

“The conflicts in Syria and Yemen have created two of the worst humanitarian crises of our time,” Johnson said ahead of the meeting.

“There can be no military solution to either conflict, only peaceful and carefully negotiated political solutions will truly end the suffering.”

The Syrian war has grown even more complex in recent days with Turkey launching a new ground operation against Kurdish militia who it considers an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Tillerson met with Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Paris on Tuesday, though he did not hold a press conference to discuss their talks.

Last week, Tillerson had warned that the US would remain in Syria until the situation was stable enough to remove President Bashar al-Assad from office. — AFP

SYDNEY — After years of futile efforts, a fresh hunt for MH370 has set off for the remote Indian Ocean — and the top Australian scientist who helped pinpoint the new search zone is hopeful the missing jet can be found within weeks.

Armed with oceanographic analyses and a high-tech search vessel, the latest search for the Boeing 777, which vanished in March 2014 carrying 239 people, kicked off on Monday run by private exploration firm Ocean Infinity, in the hope of solving one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries.

An earlier Australia-led search — the largest-ever in aviation history — scoured 120,000 square kilometers far off the island continent’s west coast for 28 months but found no trace of the aircraft, and the hunt was suspended last January.

“We’re hopeful that they (Ocean Infinity) could find the aircraft within the first month of the search,” oceanographer David Griffin of CSIRO, Australia’s leading national agency for scientific research, told AFP. “Malaysia has given them three months to complete the search. So we’re into the first week now. We could hear something from them in the next couple of weeks,” said Griffin, who met with the Ocean Infinity team in London last month.

Ocean Infinity has a huge incentive to find the plane. As part of the deal, the private team will only be paid if they find the jet or its black boxes, with up to $70 million on offer if they are successful.

The search relies on a multitude of evidence and analysis that has allowed scientists over the past four years to zero in on likely crash sites.

The new findings also allowed Griffin and his team of experts to identify a specific starting point for the search ship Seabed Constructor some 2,000 kilometers west-southwest of Perth in Western Australia. The remote site is just north of the former search zone and near the “seventh arc,” a long stretch of water where the plane was calculated to have emitted a final satellite “handshake.”

A 25,000-square-kilometer zone north of the previous probe area was first identified by experts in late 2016, and the team worked to reduce it further. They used drift modeling to analyze where three confirmed MH370 fragments found on western Indian Ocean shores between 2015-16 may have originated.

But the light-bulb moment came when they realized the absence of debris washing up in Western Australia was also a key clue, Griffin said. Only a Malaysia Airlines towelette was found on Australia’s west coast in July 2014, but authorities said then it could not be conclusively linked to MH370. “It’s fairly specific advice about where the plane crashed (as) there aren’t many places along that arc which are consistent with the absence of debris on the Australian coast,” Griffin told AFP.

Ruling out areas north and south along or near the seventh arc that were already searched, they analyzed the middle band of latitudes and found only 35 degrees south had a current flow that was to the west towards Africa. The refined search zone also fitted in with four French satellite images taken two weeks after the crash that showed at least 70 identifiable objects floating close by. Although analyses of the satellite imagery did not conclusively identify the objects as coming from MH370, Griffin said it showed an unusually high number of large pieces of floating debris.

The satellite analysis fueled calls from grieving relatives for a new search, with the Malaysian government eventually commissioning Ocean Infinity.

Hopes that the new mission might finally find the wreckage have also been raised by the high-tech tools being used. Seabed Constructor carries eight autonomous drones equipped with sonar and cameras that can operate in depths of up to 6,000 meters.

But Griffin warned that even if the new search area contains the final resting place of MH370, the most visible parts of the wreckage such as the engines could be in areas that are difficult to see or embedded deep in the ocean floor — AFP