It’s a well-known fact that neither Assad nor Putin have any compunction when it comes to lying; after all, birds of a feather do flock together.
But it isn’t very often that either one of them ends up being unintentionally outed by their very own media outlet responsible for consistently pumping out their propaganda.
Even as the Kremlin continued to deny that its warplanes were carrying incendiary weapons in Syria, the English language news channel, Russia Today, was broadcasting footage of defense minister Sergei Shoigu visiting Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia last Saturday.
A pilot can be seen in the video standing next to a plane loaded with munitions marked with numbers that identify them as being incendiary bombs that have been restricted by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, of which Russia is a signatory.
Munitions experts from Human Rights Watch, and Conflict Intelligence Team, an open-source intelligence group based in Russia, concluded that the incendiary weapons mounted on a Su-34 ground attack aircraft shown in the video were indeed RBK-500 ZAB-2.5SM bombs.
The weapons are believed to contain thermite, a powdered metal fuel that ignites while falling that is the hottest burning man-made substance in the world.
The use of these illegal thermite bombs in Syria has been corroborated by eyewitness accounts of recent airstrikes in northern Aleppo that describe “fireballs” falling from the sky which have been recorded in a number of videos taken in different areas.
“It looked like a bright shower raining down,” an activist in Aleppo had told the Telegraph. “It happened at night and the whole sky lit up. The buildings were burning for many hours after.”
The flammable contents of these incendiary weapons cause excruciatingly painful burns on their human targets and ignite fires that are extremely difficult to extinguish.
Although Russia Today denies censoring the original video, the five-second segment that clearly shows the weapons was removed after the analysts published their findings.
Eliot Higgins, munitions expert and founder of the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, helped to identify the weapons and says that using them is a bigger problem for Russia than it is for Syria which has been committing violations with impunity for years.
“We have seen these munitions used before in the conflict, since late 2012. But the interesting aspect here is that Russia appears to be the one dropping them.”
Russia Today denied altering the video to remove the evidence of the use of the illegal incendiary weapons but claims to have reinstated the original version after being accused of covering up what amounted to war crimes being committed by the Russian government in Syria.
