Dozens killed in suspected chemical attack
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A SUSPECTED chemical attack in a town in Syria’s rebel-held northern Idlib province killed dozens of people yesterday, opposition activists said, describing the attack as among the worst in the country’s six-year civil war.
Hours later, a small field hospital in the region was struck and destroyed, according to a civil defense worker in the area. There was no information if anyone was killed in that attack.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group put the death toll from the gas attack at 58, saying there were 11 children among the dead. Meanwhile, the Idlib Media Center said dozens of people had been killed.
The media center published footage of medical workers appearing to intubate an unresponsive man stripped down to his underwear and hooking up a little girl foaming at the mouth to a ventilator. It was not immediately clear if all those killed died from suffocation or were struck by other airstrikes occurring in the area around the same time.
It was the third claim of a chemical attack in just over a week in Syria. The previous two were reported in Hama province, in an area not far from Khan Sheikhoun, site of the attack.
A Syrian military source strongly denied the army had used any such weapons. The army “has not and does not use them, not in the past and not in the future, because it does not have them in the first place,” the source said.
Yesterday’s reports came on the eve of a major international meeting in Brussels on the future of Syria and the region, to be hosted by the EU’s High Representative Federica Mogherini.
Activists said it was the worst since the 2013 toxic gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta that killed hundreds of civilians. That attack, said to use toxic sarin gas, was the worst in Syria’s civil war.
In the wake of the 2013 attack, President Bashar Assad agreed to a Russia-sponsored deal to destroy his chemical arsenal and joined the Chemical Weapons Convention. His government declared a 1,300-ton stockpile of chemical weapons and so-called precursor chemicals that can be used to make weapons.
Those weapons have been destroyed, but there have been questions over whether Assad declared everything in 2013. The widely available chemical chlorine was not covered in the 2013 declaration and activists say they have documented dozens of cases of chlorine gas attacks since then.
The Syrian government has denied using chemical weapons and chlorine gas, accusing rebels instead.
Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, said the agency is contacting health providers from the Idlib center to get more information about yesterday’s incident.
The Syrian American Medical Society, which supports hospitals in opposition-held territory, said it had sent a team of inspectors to Khan Sheikhoun before noon and an investigation is underway.
The Syrian activists claimed the attack was caused by an airstrike carried out either by Syrian government or Russian warplanes.
Mohammed Hassoun, a media activist in nearby Sarmin said the hospital there had been equipped to deal with such chemical attacks because the town was struck in one chemical attack.
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