Three days before the rockets fell outside Damascus, a team of Syrian specialists gathered for a task that U.S. officials say had become routine in the third year of the country's civil conflict: filling warheads with deadly chemicals to kill Syrian rebels. The preparations, as described by U.S. intelligence analysts, continued from Aug. 18 until just after midnight on Aug. 21, when the projectiles were loaded into rocket launchers behind the government's defensive lines. Then, at 2:30 a.m., a half-dozen densely populated neighborhoods were jolted awake by a series of explosions, followed by an oozing blanket of suffocating gas. Unknown to Syrian officials, U.S. spy agencies recorded each step in the alleged chemical attack, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials. Those records and intercepts would become the core of the Obama administration's evidentiary case linking the Syrian government to what one official called an "indiscriminate, inconceivable horror" -- the use of outlawed toxins to kill nearly 1,500 civilians, including at least 426 children.
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