Red Line: The Unravelling of Syria and the Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World
JOBY WARRICK
(DOUBLEDAY, 368 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Joby Warrick, Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner for Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, succeeds here in making a particular type of journalism his own. The book is described as a “classic true-life thriller”, but that does not fully convey what it is about and how it should be understood.

The title refers to the “red line” drawn by President Barack Obama in 2012, when he warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that, if he used chemical weapons in the war in his country, there would be consequences. 
The line was crossed in Saraqeb on 29 April 2013, with a relatively small deployment, then in the early hours of 21 August 2013 in the rebel-controlled Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The death toll from the Ghouta attack was “at least 1,400, including more than four hundred children”. 

The book is driven by the need to prove that Assad or his military were responsible for these and other chemical attacks – solid proof would have Assad facing prosecution for war crimes – and by the mechanics of removing Assad’s vast stockpile of chemical weapons from Syria, an exercise finally agreed to by Damascus and Assad’s Russian backers.