Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (R) speaks during an interview with al-Mayadin television station, in Damascus, in this handout photograph distributed by Syria's national news agency SANA on October 21, 2013. REUTERS/SANA/Handout via Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - On Sunday, September 29, President Bashar al-Assad declared to the world, via an interview on Italian television, his resolve to clear Syria of chemical weapons - accepting a Russian-brokered deal to avert punitive U.S. action.
That same morning his forces appear to have dropped some of the most powerful conventional weapons yet used in the civil war, in the rebel-held town of Raqqa. Evidence at the scene and witness testimony led Human Rights Watch to conclude that the 14 dead, many of them children, were killed by "vacuum bombs".
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