The United States representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) strongly condemned the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday. Ambassador Kenneth P. Ward called the chemical attack launched by the regime on the town of Khan Sheikhoun a “direct affront to the Chemical Weapons Convention and, indeed, a direct affront to human decency, carried out by a State Party.”

“On April 4, the lifeless bodies of innocent victims, grotesquely contorted and twisted by the nerve agent sarin, tell the real story,” Ward continued. Syria “provided a grossly incomplete declaration to the OPCW of its chemical weapons program. It continues to possess and use chemical weapons.”

Following a lethal 2013 chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, Assad made a deal to get rid of his chemical weapons stockpile. Despite an announcement by then-President Barack Obama in August 2014 that the deal had eliminated Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile, reports persisted that Syria continued using the proscribed munitions. Since the deal, Syria has mostly used chlorine–an industrial chemical that can also be deployed as a weapon–in “barrel bomb” attacks.

Ward was also fiercely critical of a major Assad ally: the “outrage is abetted by Russia‘s continuing efforts to bury the truth and protect the Syrian regime,” he said.

[Photo: Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]