Syria chemical attack victims want investigation reopened

Toufik Dayem is emotional because it is the first time he has been able to talk openly about what happened to his family in Douma, in the eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus, in 2018.

He says, “If I had spoken out earlier, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut out my tongue. They would have cut my throat. We were not allowed to talk about it.”

Taufiq’s wife and their four children aged between eight and 12 – Jaudi, Mohammed, Ali and Qamar – were killed in a chemical attack on 7 April 2018.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global watchdog, said in a report last year that it believed a Syrian Air Force helicopter took off from nearby Dumayr air base shortly after 19:00 that day and Dropped two yellow cylinders. Released highly concentrated chlorine gas after hitting two apartment buildings.

Taufiq said his family was outside their house on the ground floor when the bombs fell.

“I heard an explosion and people started shouting ‘chemicals, chemicals’ in the streets. I ran outside. There was a very foul smell. I saw yellow foam coming out of people’s mouths. My children could not breathe, they were asphyxiated. I was suffocating. I saw people lying on the road,” he says.

The OPCW says at least 43 people were killed. Taufik says more than 100 people were killed.

He says, “Even I almost died. I was in the hospital for 10 days. There were only five or six men left alive in this compound.”

Assad’s government has denied ever using chemical weapons. And its ally Russia said the Douma attack was “premeditated”.

Eastern Ghouta was one of the most heavily fought areas during the Syrian civil war for five years.

The regime eventually laid siege to it and, along with its ally Russia, indiscriminately bombed the area as it sought to wrest control of it from rebel fighters led by the Jaysh al-Islam group.

Driving through it now, the destruction it causes is all around us. It is difficult to find a single building that does not bear the marks of war, many buildings were so badly bombed that they are simply shells of structures.

On more than one occasion in Eastern Ghouta, chemical weapons banned by the Geneva Protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention were used to attack Douma.

Bashar al-Assad’s forces captured Douma shortly after the chlorine attack, and the victims’ stories were never fully heard.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my children,” Taufiq says, pulling out the only photograph of them he has, tears welling up in his eyes.

As we talk to Taufiq, more people come to us to tell their stories.

Khalid Naseer says his daughter Noor, his two-year-old son Omar and his pregnant wife Fatima also died in the 2018 chlorine attack.

“Most of those killed were children and women.”

The anger he was suppressing for six years came out.

“The whole world knows that Bashar al-Assad is a tyrant and a liar, and that he killed his own people. My wife was killed two days before she gave birth to our child,” he shouts. , Emotions are rising.

The chlorine gas attack was not the only time chemical weapons were used in the area.

In 2013, rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were fired at several rebel-held suburbs in Eastern and Western Ghouta, killing hundreds. UN experts confirmed the use of sarin but were not asked to assign any blame.

Assad denied that his forces fired the rockets, but he agreed to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy Syria’s declared chemical arsenal.

Between 2013 and 2018, Human Rights Watch documented at least 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, accusing the Syrian government of being responsible for most of them.

In addition to Douma in 2018, the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team has identified the Syrian Army as the perpetrator of four other cases of chemical weapons use in 2017 and 2018. An earlier fact-finding mission, which was not mandated to identify perpetrators, found chemical weapons were used in 20 cases.

Khalid and Taufiq took us a short distance away to a mound by the side of a road. He believes this is where the regime took his family’s bodies and buried them in a mass grave.

Looking down at the ground, bone fragments are visible among the gravel, soil and stones, although it is not possible to tell whether these are human remains or not.

“This is the first time I’ve set foot here, I swear to God. If I had tried to come here earlier, they (the regime) would have killed me,” says Taufik.

“On Eid, when I missed my family, I would drive along this road and quickly look towards this (mound). It would make me cry.”

Taufiq wants the graves to be dug, so that he can give his family a dignified funeral.

“We want a fresh investigation into the attack,” Khalid says, adding that testimony given by several people to an OPCW fact-finding mission in 2019 was not credible.

This claim is supported by Abdul Rahman Hijazi, one of the eyewitnesses who testified before the mission, who says he was forced to give the regime’s version of events.

“Intelligence officers detained me and asked me to lie. They told me that people died not because of chemicals but because of dust. They threatened me that if I did not obey, my family would not be safe. They told me to rule the house ‘ had been surrounded by the people of ‘,” he said.

One of the findings of the 2019 OPCW report on Douma stated: “Some witnesses said that a number of people died in hospital on 7 April as a result of heavy shelling and/or asphyxiation due to smoke and dust.”

Abdul Rahman says he and his family were shunned by the community for years after testifying. He was finding it difficult to get a job.

Now he also wants a fresh investigation.

“I want the truth to come out. I can’t sleep. I want justice for every parent.”

Additional reporting by Aamir Pirzada, Sanjay Ganguly and Leanne Al Saadi