1. The insidious nature of chemical attacks
My clearest memory of visiting Khan Sheikhoun, two days after more than 80 people were killed in a toxic gas attack, was the graves.
Freshly dug red earth lined the tombstones. Abdelhamid Al Youssef, who had been receiving mourners at his home, teared up as he spoke of his wife and two children. He buried them on the day of the attack, hours after gas penetrated their home, suffocating the occupants. The faraway look on Abdelhamid’s face showed his mind was elsewhere. In all, 20 members of his family were killed.
There is something particularly insidious about chemical attacks – the way the body betrays the victims, the way it upends expectations of safety by seeping into underground bomb shelters like liquid on cloth. Then there are the final paroxysms of death as the mouth foams and the end comes.
Sarin gas will choke you regardless of whether you are a civilian or a fighter, whether you don military fatigues or the uniform of the volunteer rescue workers. If you are a human, you will die or at the very least suffer. Poisoning the air is the ultimate tool of collective punishment.
In 2013 the Syrian government used sarin gas on the Ghouta region, killing more than 1,300 civilians in what remains the worst chemical atrocity of the war.
The pictures of children in white shrouds haunted the world, and nearly prompted US intervention. President Barack Obama had said use of chemical weapons would be a red line for America.
Then, Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking off the cuff, said the American government
could be placated if Al Assad gave up his entire chemical arsenal. Russia brokered a deal whereby those stockpiles were supposedly destroyed.
The sudden diplomatic shuffle, however, had a long-lasting effect: the Syrian regime appeared to draw the lesson that it could use anything against the population except chemical weapons.
Al Assad’s forces continued to use chlorine, a chemical that can be used in smaller doses to cause fear and suffocation without killing a lot of civilians. Chlorine was not covered under the deal brokered by Russia because it has industrial uses such as water purification, even though its use as a weapon is banned under international law.
Between March and May 2015, opposition doctors and rescue workers said they documented at least 35 cases of possible chlorine attacks, with only nine deaths.
That pattern persisted until Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, vowing improved relations with Russia, which had intervened in the war in Syria, and hinting that the administration no longer regarded Al Assad’s departure as a priority. Soon the Syrian regime would test the administration’s tolerance by dropping sarin gas on Khan Sheikhoun in the early hours of April 4.
Mr Trump responded by ordering 59 cruise missiles to be fired at the base from which the plane that dropped the sarin took off. Independent UN investigators and western intelligence agencies were able to reconstruct the details of the attack and link it back to the regime’s stockpiles.
There was little retribution beyond the isolated American strikes. The norms against chemical weapons use had been weakened. Despite renewed warnings from western powers, the Assad regime has reportedly used chemicals again in its continuing assault on the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, with attacks and symptoms bearing the fingerprints of chlorine or organo-phosphorous fertiliser used as weaponry.
The ability of his forces to do so has highlighted that in an era of sophisticated warfare, ancient methods of killing are arguably the most devastating.