'It violates every convention of warfare,' U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says.
U.S. intelligence has concluded "with some degree of varying confidence," that the Syrian government has used sarin gas as a weapon in its 2-year-old civil war, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said today.
Hagel, speaking to reporters in Abu Dhabi, said the White House has informed two senators by letter that, within the past day, "our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin."
"It violates every convention of warfare," Hagel said.
No information was made public on what quantity of chemical weapons might have been used, or when or what casualties might have resulted.