Thread: 'The dead were wherever you looked': inside Syrian town after gas attack

'The dead were wherever you looked': inside Syrian town after gas attack

Thursday 6 April 2017 14.56 EDT

Khan Sheikhun is a ghost town, its streets deserted and silent as though mourning the victims of the atrocity that occurred here two days earlier.

The only reminder of what happened is a small, blackened, crater near the northern part of town, where a rocket laced with a nerve agent fell, killing more than 70 people in one of the worst mass casualty chemical attacks in the six-year war in Syria.

All that remains of the attack on the town in rebel-held Idlib province is a faint stench that tingles the nostrils and a small green fragment from the rocket. The houses nearby are emptied of the living.

The victims’ symptoms are consistent with sarin, the nerve agent that was dropped on an opposition-held area near Damascus in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people. After that attack the regime supposedly gave up its chemical weapons arsenal.

Moscow, Bashar al-Assad’s principal backer in the war, said the Syrian government had bombed a rebel-run toxic gas manufacturing plant in Khan Sheikhun, and that the gas had subsequently leaked out.
A label marks the site of the attack.

A label marks the site of the attack. Photograph: Kareem Shaheen for the Guardian

The Guardian, the first western media organisation to visit the site of the attack, examined a warehouse and silos directly next to where the missile had landed, and found nothing but an abandoned space covered in dust and half-destroyed silos reeking of leftover grain and animal manure.

Residents said the silos had been damaged in air raids six months ago, and had stood unused since then.

“You can look at it ; there’s nothing there except maybe some grain and animal dung, and there’s even a dead goat there that suffocated in the attack,” one person said. Residents responded in disbelief to the Russian allegation.

There was no evidence of any building being hit in recent days or weeks near where so many people were killed and wounded by a nerve agent. The homes across the street appeared undamaged from the outside. There was no contamination zone near any building. Instead, the contamination area radiated from a hole in a road.

The warehouse next to where the missile landed – now an abandoned space covered in dust.

The warehouse next to where the missile landed – now an abandoned space covered in dust. Photograph: Kareem Shaheen for the Guardian

The Guardian interviewed witnesses, first responders, victims’ relatives and the wounded in an effort to reconstruct the attack. They offered fresh details that shed light on an incident that has prompted worldwide condemnation and refocused attention on the brutality of the Syrian war.

American military strike hits airbase in Syria in retaliation for what US president called ‘horrible chemical weapons attack’ in Idlib

“It was like Judgment Day,” said Hamid Khutainy, a civil defence volunteer in Khan Sheikhun.

Witnesses said the air raids began shortly after 6.30am on Tuesday, with four bombings around the town. Initially they thought it was just another airstrike, until the first responders who arrived at the scene began falling to the ground.

Khutainy said: “They told us ‘HQ, we are losing control’. We had no idea what they were trying to say. Then they said, ‘come save us, we can no longer walk’. So the second and third teams went with just face masks. We could smell it from 500 metres away.”

People described a scene of utter horror at the attack site . The wounded were shaking and convulsing on the ground, foaming at the mouth, their lips blue, passing in and out of consciousness.

“I found children lying on the ground, in their last breaths, their lips going blue,” said Abu al-Baraa, who lives nearby and rushed to help when the full extent of what had happened dawned on him.

Standing across the street from the crater left by the missile, he added: “People on the rooftops and in the basements. People on the ground in the street. Wherever you looked there were dead human beings.”

The suffocating patients and those who had died were taken to the nearby civil defence centre and the adjacent clinic built into the side of a rocky mountainous outcrop to withstand potential airstrikes. The dead were laid in a nearby shed while emergency workers hosed down the injured with water, and administered atropine, a nerve agent antidote.

But while medical workers were trying to come to grips with the crisis, between eight and 10 airstrikes targeted the medical facility and civil defence centre. The shed collapsed on the dead, and the site was put out of service.

“Maybe the pilots heard the myth that you could come back to life 48 hours after dying from sarin, so they decided to bomb them again just in case,” said an official from the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group who was on the scene. “Thank God there is a Day of Judgment in the afterlife.”

The Guardian visited the destroyed medical facility and civil defence centre briefly. Local people said reconnaissance planes had been spotted in the sky earlier and believed the area might be targeted again later in the day.

The site was filled with rubble. Inside, hospital equipment, beds, surgical instruments and small boxes of medicine lay covered in dust or broken on the ground. There were no weapons in sight, and the rooms inside the cave were darkened with the electricity knocked out.

In a nearby cemetery, the graves were still fresh from funerals the day before, the red soil still upturned. In one corner 18 new graves were set up, the names barely etched with a rough chisel on the tombstones. They contained the bodies of 20 people, including two children who were buried with their mother. They were all from the same family.

Abdulhamid al-Yousef, one of the few survivors in the family, was receiving condolences at his home in Khan Sheikhun, a day after burying his wife and nine-month-old twins, Ahmed and Aya, fighting back tears.

Yousef had rushed to help the other victims of the attack. He came back instead to find that much of his family had perished, including siblings, nephews and nieces. His wife and children had rushed down to the bomb shelter in their basement, only for the toxic gas to seep into it, which killed them all.

That evening at the cemetery, he insisted on carrying his two infants in his arms to bury them himself. Almost in a trance Yousef repeated the children’s names, choking as he did so. “Aya and Ahmed, my souls. Yasser and Ahmed, my brothers who had my back. Ammoura and Hammoudi, Shaimaa, so many others,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...hemical-attack

Khutainy said: “They told us ‘HQ, we are losing control’. We had no idea what they were trying to say. Then they said, ‘come save us, we can no longer walk’. So the second and third teams went with just face masks. We could smell it from 500 metres away.”

See this is what I'm talking about. This makes no sense if it's sarin gas. Sarin gas is odorless and colorless. You can't see it in "blue and yellow streaks falling from the sky" as one female witness victim claimed in the video they put out yesterday and you can't "smell it from 500 metres away" as this person in this Guardian article claims because you can't smell it at all.

Odorless in pure form. ... Sarin, or GB (G-series, 'B'), is a colorless, odorless liquid, used as a chemical weapon due to its extreme potency as a nerve agent. It is generally considered a weapon of mass destruction.
Sarin - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin

Survivors of Syrian attack describe chemical bombs falling from sky

By Angela Dewan, Kareem Khadder and Holly Yan, CNN

Updated 11:39 PM ET, Thu April 6, 2017
Syrian survivors detail moment of attack

(CNN)Survivors of a deadly airstrike in Syria have described chemical bombs being dropped from planes, in accounts that directly contradicted the Assad regime's version of a dawn attack that drew condemnation around the world.

The White House and the UK blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime for the attack that struck the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun while many were still asleep.

The strike, one of the deadliest of its kind since the Syrian war began six years ago, killed at least 70 people, including children.

Syria denied it used chemical weapons. Russia asserted the deaths resulted from a gas released when a regime airstrike hit a "terrorist" chemical weapons factory on the ground. But survivors being treated in a hospital on the Turkish side of the border told a CNN team they saw chemical bombs dropped from the air.

The World Health Organization said victims bore the signs of exposure to nerve agents, and Amnesty International said evidence pointed to an "air-launched chemical attack." International agencies are investigating the origin of the agents used in the strike.

At the United Nations, Western powers lambasted Russia for standing by the Syrian regime.

Key developments

Chemical weapons expert: Russia's explanation of events is "highly implausible."
US President Donald Trump said the attack changed his views on Syria and Assad.
Medical experts said the attack was likely the result of a nerve agent, such as sarin gas.
The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting but didn't vote on a resolution.

War of words

Trump called the attack on innocent civilians an "affront to humanity," saying it had changed his views on Syria and Assad. "These heinous actions by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated," Trump said.

"It crossed a lot of lines for me. When you kill innocent children, innocent babies ... with a chemical gas that is so lethal that people were shocked to hear what gas it was, that crosses many, many lines -- beyond a red line."

The Russian Defense Ministry said on its Facebook page that a Syrian airstrike hit "workshops, which produced chemical warfare munitions" on the eastern outskirts of Khan Sheikhoun. It said "terrorists" had been transporting the chemical munitions from their largest arsenal to Iraq.

What we know about Syria's chemical weapons

Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons specialist, told CNN the Russian version of events was "highly implausible."

"Nerve agents are the result of a very expensive, exotic, industrial chemical process -- these are not something you just whip up," said Kaszeta, managing director of Strongpoint Security, a security consulting firm based in London.

"It's much more plausible that Assad, who's used nerve agents in the past, is using them again."

Hours after the attack, several people were injured when an airstrike hit near a hospital in the same town. Survivors of the earlier attack were being treated there, the Aleppo Media Center activist group reported.

The hospital was knocked out of service, said the Syrian Civil Defense rescue group, known as the White Helmets.

Mazin Yusif, a 13-year-old-boy, broke down in tears at the Reyhanli Hospital in southern Turkey near the Syrian border. About 25 survivors of Tuesday's attack are being treated there, and several said they saw a plane drop chemical bombs.

"At 6:30 in the morning, the plane struck. I ran up on our roof and saw that the strike was in front of my grandfather's house," Mazin told CNN.

He said he ran toward his house and found his grandfather slumped over. He ran outside to call for help. "I got dizzy and then fainted in front of my grandfather's garage. I next found myself here in this hospital, naked in a bed."

Aisha al-Tilawi, 55, says she lost three members of her family in Tuesday's attack.

The boy's grandmother, Aisha al-Tilawi, 55, said she saw blue and yellow after the plane dropped a chemical-laden bomb.

"We started choking, felt dizzy, then fainted. Mazin was trying to wake up his grandfather. Three of my family died," she said, lying in bed with an oxygen mask on her face.

Ahmed Abdel Rahim, 31, says he has no idea of his family's whereabouts after the attack.

Another survivor, Ahmed Abdel Rahim, 31, stared vacantly from his hospital bed while explaining he was hit with a poisonous substance carried by three rockets.

"I was in my house. I had difficulty breathing, but I feel better now. But I did throw up after getting to the hospital. I don't know if my family is dead or alive. I don't know anything," he said.

Worldwide condemnation

WHO said some victims showed symptoms consistent with exposure to a category of chemicals that includes nerve agents. That conclusion was supported by Amnesty International, which said victims were "very likely" to have been exposed to a compound such as sarin.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it was gathering evidence about the attack.

Speaking at a high-level meeting in Belgium on the future of Syria, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson blamed the Syrian regime.

"All the evidence I have seen suggests that it was the Assad regime who did it, in full knowledge they were using illegal weapons in a barbaric attack on their own people," Johnson said.

Assad's military has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons and consistently blames "terrorist" groups when chemical attacks are reported.

But many of these are delivered through airstrikes, and no rebel or terrorist group in Syria is believed to have the capacity to carry out aerial bombardments.

A UN investigation in August found that chemical weapons had been used in Syria, both by the national air force and ISIS militants. It found two instances where regime forces had used chlorine as a chemical weapon, and one where ISIS had used mustard gas between 2014 and 2015.

The Syrian Coalition, an umbrella opposition group, compared this week's chemical attack to one in 2013 in eastern Ghouta "that the international community allowed to pass without accountability or punishment."

A UN report found that sarin had been used on civilians in the earlier attack that activists said killed about 1,400 people.

UN emergency meeting takes no action

At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador, held up photographs of children foaming at the mouth as evidence of the attack.

"If Russia has the influence in Syria that it claims to have, we need to see them use it," said Haley, who is the council president. "We need to see them put an end to these horrific acts. How many more children have to die before Russia cares?"

Haley hinted that the United States was open to using military action in response. "When the UN consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action," she said.

Russia, Syria's most powerful ally, made clear it would not support a resolution put forward by the United States, the UK and France condemning the use of chemical weapons within Syria and requiring the regime to provide flight logs from the day of the attack.

Russia has used its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council at least seven times on Syrian resolutions.

On Wednesday afternoon, Security Council members left closed consultations without taking a vote on the draft resolution. No member spoke as they left the chambers.

Syria's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Mounzer Mounzer, flatly denied accusations his government is responsible, blaming "terrorist groups" for the dozens of deaths.

"Syria also reaffirms that the Syrian Arab Army does not have any form or type of chemical weapons," he said. "We have never used them, and we will never use them."

CNN's Euan McKirdy, Ben Wedeman, Tamara Qiblawi, Eyad Kourdi, Lindsay Isaac, Onur Cakir, Richard Roth and Milena Veselinovic contributed to this report.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/05/middle...-syria-attack/