On July 23, 2012, a former spokesman for the Syrian foreign ministry acknowledged for the first time that his government had stockpiles of chemical weapons, but asserted that they would "never, never be used against the Syrian people or civilians during this crisis, under any circumstances." A little more than a year later, approximately 1,400 people on the outskirts of Damascus were killed in a chemical attack carried out by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.