'I saw death everywhere. Some bodies were never recognised as their entire family had died.'
By Louisa Loveluck and Magdy Samaan
6:55PM BST 21 Aug 2015
It was the attack that crossed President Obama’s ‘red line’ and was supposed to change the Syrian war. Two years ago today in the suburbs of eastern Damascus, the deaths of hundreds of civilians at the hands of a regime nerve gas attack brought Britain and America to the brink of intervention.
But for the residents of Eastern and Western Ghouta, an industrial and agricultural zone less than 10 miles from the centre of the capital, hopes of rescue have morphed painfully into a sense of abandonment.
The ‘game-changer’ has, if anything, made their lives worse.
More than 100,000 families remain under siege, under fire, and all but forgotten. The flow of people and goods is heavily restricted by troops loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Residents describe it as an open air prison which is constantly under threat from attack.
“The blockade is killing us and the international community is complicit in its silence,” said Ammar Ahmed, a local resident who survived the 2013 nerve gas attack.
Last Sunday, regime war planes killed 111 people in a busy market place in Eastern Ghouta’s administrative capital, Douma. Days earlier, a napalm-like substance sent fires ripping through a neighbouring suburb.
Mr Assad’s government says attacks target local rebel groups. Analysis of the airstrikes published last week by Amnesty International last week found that civilian areas are often hit with no strategic target anywhere near.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Neil Sammonds, the group’s Syria researcher. “Direct attacks on civilians are the worst form of war crimes.”
When airstrikes hit, medical centres find themselves increasingly unable to cope. Local doctors say medicines and equipment are running dangerously low. The siege has prompted vast fuel price inflation, often placing a victim’s relatives in a desperate bind - passage to a makeshift field hospital can cost more than the average monthly salary can cover.
When regime rockets cloaked the homes of people like Mr Ahmed in sarin last year, western leaders said that Mr Assad had finally gone too far. President Barack Obama had previously described the use of chemical weapons as America’s ‘red line’.
Sarin has no smell or taste, so the first that many knew of its use in the early hours of 21 August 2013 was when the victims started to fall. Credible estimates put the death toll at between 500 and 1400.
“I saw death everywhere,” said Braa Abdulrahman, an eyewitness who recalled finding a neighbour lying among his family’s corpses. The man had returned to his house to find them all dead.
"Entire families died. They put numbers on the foreheads of all the corpses until each was recognised by a relative. Some bodies were never recognised as their entire family had died."
It was the worst use of nerve gas since Saddam Hussein killed 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja 25 years before. Video footage from neighbourhood hospitals showed hundreds of pale bodies, convulsing into death.
When Mr Ahmed, 30, entered the basement of his local mosque, he found bodies strewn across the floor. “I tried to carry a man up the stairs, but then the gas hit me,” he said. “I tried once, twice, three times, but each time I fell.”
Shielded by allies in Russia and Iran, Syria forestalled foreign intervention by promising to eliminate its chemical weapons programme.
Experts have long suspected the regime kept reserves behind and, earlier this year, international inspectors found traces of chemicals used to make sarin and the nerve agent VX at a military facility.
Many now see the decision not to intervene as the moment the west ceded its ability to shape the outcome of Syria’s war. In doing so, it left the field open to an ever more radicalised group of Islamist militias, including Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), to dominate the struggle against the regime.
“Internationally the inaction sent a signal that tyrants could get away with anything - provided they did it gradually,” said Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at international affairs think tank Chatham House.
“It was against this backdrop and a number of other key events that Isil rose to prominence, benefiting from the division, the cynicism and the loss in faith that dominated Syria since 2013,” he said.
Two years on, the diplomatic landscape has dramatically changed. As the conflict drags into its fifth year, at least 250,000 people have been killed and the lights across the country have all but gone out.
The barbarity of life under Isil rule has been well documented. Yet Mr Assad’s regime remains the greatest killer of civilians. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group, more than 8,000 people were killed by forces loyal to the government between January and July of this year alone.
Mr Assad’s regime continues to mount regular chemical attacks on rebel-held territory, using mostly chlorine. In April, members of the UN Security Council were moved to tears after watching a video of an apparent chlorine gas attack in north-west Syria.
Mr Abdulrahman said on Friday that survivors in Ghouta attack were under no illusions about the impact of international inaction. “We know who killed our children,” he said. "Now, the regime has a green light to kill us."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11817406/I-saw-death-everywhere.-Some-bodies-were-never-recognised-as-their-entire-family-had-died..html