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Motivation and timing

Several reporters, military experts and government officials have questioned the motivation and the timing of the attack, since a team from the United Nations Mission to Investigate Alleged Uses of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic arrived in Damascus just three days before the attack, and since the Syrian Government handed over its own investigation report of the Khan al-Assal chemical attack to the U.N. mission on 20 August 2013, only hours before the attack.

Charles Heyman, a former British officer and editor of many authoritative military books said, "We can’t get our heads around this – why would any commander agree to rocketing a suburb of Damascus with chemical weapons for only a very short-term tactical gain for what is a long-term disaster”.

Gwyn Winfield, the editorial Director of CBRNe World, which specialises in chemical weapons issues, wrote that it seemed that the very worst time to use chemical weapons would be when the UN inspectors had landed, and that those who would take advantage from it was going to be the rebels. This placed, he wrote, those with the means without the motive, and those with the motive without the means.

Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army general who heads the Beirut-based Middle East Center for Studies and Political Research, and closely follows the Syrian Civil War, said it would be “political suicide” for the regime to commit such an act given Obama’s warning.

A CNN reporter pointed to the fact that government forces did not appear to be in imminent danger of being overrun by opposition in the areas in question, in which a stalemate had set. He questioned why the army would risk such an action that could cause international intervention. A reporter for The Daily Telegraph also pointed to the questionable timing given government forces had recently beaten back opposition in some areas around Damascus and recaptured territory. "Using chemical weapons might make sense when he is losing, but why launch gas attacks when he is winning anyway?" The reporter also questioned why would the attacks happen just three days after the inspectors arrived in Syria. Also a reporter for The Independent, questioned why the Damascus regime would launch such a sustained assault with chemical weapons with UN inspectors in a hotel a dozen miles away and its forces making advances on the ground using conventional weapons.

Possible opposition motives

According to military experts, the opposition cannot win without western military intervention or support. Russian and Syrian government officials have argued that the opposition had an incentive to stage a false flag attack to provoke an intervention. Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, said there is every reason to believe the poison gas was used "not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists".

Sergei Markov, an analyst connected to the Kremlin, said that only the Syrian opposition had an incentive to use chemical weapons on civilians. At the time of the attack, he said, the rebels were losing ground in the war and crossing President Obama's "red-line", which would trigger direct Western intervention on their side, was the only way to improve their position. Also U.S. intelligence officials have expressed doubt that the attack was carried out on Assad's orders. Some U.S. intelligence officials have even talked about the possibility that opposition forces could have carried out the attack in a "calculated attempt to draw the West into the war."