What mysteries lie in the ruins of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in Damascus?
The great 10th century Iraqi poet Abu Tayyib al-Mutanabbi once lived, O fated city, in the Emirate of Aleppo. He even led a revolt in Syria which was  familiar stuff, this  put down with great ruthlessness. Al-Mutanabbi actually spent two years in prison before reconciling himself to his loss and was subsequently released. Most Arab children in Syria can quote the man by heart and one of their favourite poems begins with these words:  When you see the teeth of a lion,  Dont think that the lion is smiling at you. Recommended The search for truth in the rubble of Douma  I was reminded of this lion while clambering through the ruins on the side of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in the Damascus suburb of Barzeh last week. This was the centre  now famous from so many satellite pictures  destroyed by Donald Trumps missiles when they struck at the heart of Syrias chemical weapons programme. Anything with a Strangelove name like the Department of Pharmaceutical and Civilian Chemical Research  the bit of the complex hit by at least 13 missiles  deserves to have its contents studied closely. Id been refused permission to visit this Syrian institution for three days. Well, yes. I am reminded of the much more famous Iraqi baby milk factory bombed by the Americans in 1991 which General Colin Powell called a biological weapons factory, of that we are sure. My colleague Patrick Cockburn wrote of this last week, recalling his visit to the factory only hours after the bombing. The problem is that while we believe all Arab dictators regularly lie, we Western folk are supposed to hold our own leaders to account  and ensure that they tell the truth when they claim to act on our behalf. Thats why the Douma attack must be fully explained, and thats why I wanted to know if this wreckage in Barzeh (the direct response to Douma, although of course no one was killed in Barzeh) was what we said it was, or whether it was what the Syrians claimed it to be  a medical research facility.  Corbyn leads debate into Parliament vote on Syria strikes: 'The government is attempting to overturn a democratic advance'  Certainly Dr Said al-Said, head of the centres polymers department, was all smiles, and for what its worth, he doesnt look like Dr Strangelove. And the rubble of his bombed research centre when I met him, without minders or guards, yielded to me little proof of the chemical warfare research centre its American destroyers claimed it to be. It looked, indeed, very much like a site where, according to the 192-nation Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, during its most recent visit last November, there was no evidence of chemical or biological weapons being developed, tested or produced. The OPCW is the same institute currently investigating the presumed gas attack on Douma. If this was a chemical weapons centre, he says, jabbing me in the chest with his finger, Youd be dead just standing here today. Hardly conclusive given the time that had elapsed, and of course it may have been used merely for research, rather than storage of chemical weapons, which formed one part of the Americans claim. Same old question. 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I was free to roam around in the sun, much to 64-year old Al-Saids amusement. But it had been four days since the American-Anglo-French air strikes. Western politicians routinely accuse their enemies of hoovering up incriminating evidence before opening bomb sites to any journalists. And Id been kept waiting for three days. Yet when I eventually drove through the gates of the campus, documents and files were still wedged into the flattened concrete and flapping in the breeze. The most intriguing papers I could find related to a desalination project in rural Syria and a published dissertation in English by Kuwaiti scientists on the use of rubber in sealing concrete road bridges. While I was there, mechanical diggers began to haul away vast hunks of masonry  some with yet more papers trapped in the wreckage  and dumping them in commercial lorries for disposal. And while Im no chemical weapons expert, the OPCW definitely is, and visited Barzeh several times in 2013. They said it was free of any chemical warfare research, Al-Said said. The published reports confirm this but no visit has taken place since last November. There was still a strong smell of burning plastic which he attributed to the smouldering remains of computers and plastic desks in the ruins. I walked deep inside the wreckage and neither the workmen nor the centres portly boss grew nervous or asked me to stop  usually a tell-tale sign that someone is getting nervous. It happened to me in Serbia when I discovered military slit-trenches behind a Nato-bombed hospital  the civilian patients, it turned out, were dead, the Yugoslav soldiers hiding there against all the laws of war were unharmed and long departed. Among the undamaged buildings on the Syrian campus were student lecture rooms and a childrens school with paintings of animals which had clearly  given the fading paint  been decorated on the walls many summers ago. Dr Al-Said himself trained as an applied chemist, first in Dresden (when it was still part of eastern Germany) and then at Dusseldorf. He had worked here for 15 years, he said, but was at home ten miles away when the missiles struck in the early hours. I am not an expert in politics, he replied. But with the Americans and British and French, you can expect anything.  A Syrian soldier films the damage of the Syrian Scientific Research Center (AP)  His students and lecturers, he insisted, were researching the production of medicinal chemicals and especially the DNA of scorpions and snakes, and leukemias and cancers. We have been producing the research for medicines for local use but which are sold all over the Middle East. We were developing rubber particles [sic] for the oil industry and researching the use of rubber for bridge construction. When Al-Said told me this, he was unaware that I had already found papers on the subject amid the rubble  a point in his favour. The OPCW had given us certificates twice, he added. I also noted that this large campus lay less than a mile from the scene of fierce battles 18 months ago between the government army and Nusrah (as well as some Free Syrian Army rebels). I witnessed some of this fighting at the time. If the Americans were correct when they said at the weekend that the Barzeh centre is used for the research, development, production and testing of chemical and biological weaponry, then the regime was certainly taking some grave risks  before or after  the battles. For the American claims to be correct, then, an awful lot of work must have gone on to change the nature of this complex in the past five months  since the OPCW inspectors were last there. The infamous Baghdad baby milk factory is now generally accepted to have been genuine  although the Iraqi regime put a fake sign in English on the wrecked gates for television cameras after the bombing. The only sign beside the wrecked Syrian complex is a large portrait of Bashar al-Assad with the legend All for you written upon it. In Arabic. But back to the lion. Poor old Muttanabi was eventually killed by a man whom he had insulted in a poem. His name  wait for it  was Dabbah al-Assadi. No relation, of course