PARIS, Nov 15 (Reuters) - French judges have issued arrest warrants for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, and two other senior officials over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, a judicial source said on Wednesday.

It is the first international arrest warrant that has been issued for the Syrian head of state, whose forces responded to protests that began in 2011 with a brutal crackdown that U.N. experts have said amounts to war crimes.

These are also the first international arrest warrants that have been issued over the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, said Mazen Darwish, lawyer and founder of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the case in France.

Assad was shunned for more than a decade by most countries in the region and the rest of the world, with a few rare trips to Russia and Iran since the war broke out in 2011.

Warrants were issued to Ghassam Abbas, director of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), the agency that established Syria’s chemical weapons programme, and Bassam al-Hassan, chief of security and liaison officer.

In October, French judges issued warrants for two former defence ministers over a 2017 bomb that killed a French-Syrian man at his home in Daraa.

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