Little girl left foaming at the mouth by horrific gas attack
VICTIMS of the poison gas atrocity in Douma told yesterday of the terrifying effects of the attack.
Families who survived the deadly assault described hearing a ‘hissing’ noise before choking on clouds of gas which left a stench of chlorine.
They told how their limbs began to shake uncontrollably and their mouths foamed as they fought to breathe.
Experts said the first-hand accounts were consistent with exposure to a nerve gas, and images have emerged of a compressed gas canister found in Douma, on the roof of a building where several of the dead were found.
Inspectors from the chemical weapons watchdog were due to begin work at the site over the weekend, as Russian politicians met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
However the victims’ accounts provide powerful evidence of an outrage.
At least 75 people are believed to have been killed in the attack on April 7 and thousands of survivors have fled to refugee camps in northern Syria.
Among them were seven-year-old twin sisters Masa and Malaz, who were hiding in a basement in Douma with their family and dozens of their neighbours when the attack began.
The group had taken cover after barrel bombs began falling – but then described hearing two smaller bangs followed by ‘a hissing sound’.
The girls’ mother Amani, 34, told The Sunday Times that she heard men shouting ‘Gas! Gas!’.
She then saw a white cloud and dust pouring down into the basement and grabbed one of the twins, Masa, while her brother-inlaw took Malaz as her husband was too weak.
She said: ‘The gas was spicy. Spicy in my throat like chilli. I was vomiting and coughing. No one could breathe. Around me people were just falling to the ground.’
She tried pouring water over Masa’s face in an attempt to wash off the poison, but said foam began forming in the corners of the child’s mouth. The mother said: ‘My whole body didn’t work. When I was climbing the stairs I could feel myself losing strength.
‘I couldn’t control my body. I was just shaking the whole time. There wasn’t oxygen.’
Amani collapsed and said when she came round there were more barrel bombs falling. She could not find her husband Diaa or her other daughter.
They had collapsed on the building’s second floor after inhaling the gas – but were conscious and the family made it outside to the street. Still choking, the family staggered to a clinic but found it overwhelmed with victims.
Another survivor, Ibrahim, said a doctor was crying because she had 40 patients who needed medicine, but only enough supplies to treat three. The twins were barely breathing but were given injections – while their mother was rushed back to hospital days later, suffering from the aftereffects of exposure.
She said: ‘We were still getting sick from the bags and clothes we had in the basement. We didn’t know.’ Days later, the purple Tshirt Masa wore that night still carried the smell of chlorine.
Amani said three people had died in the basement where her family had sheltered, but that dozens were killed in the cellar next door because they had not heard the gas until it was too late, and were unable to get out.
She added: ‘They were innocent people. They were our friends. They became numbers, but they are not. They are civilians and families.’ Ibrahim Reyhani, a White Helmet civil defence volunteer, said anyone who touched the bodies started getting sick, and said he believed a mixture of sarin and chlorine had been used.
He told The Sunday Times: ‘If it’s just chlorine, if you smell it you can escape. But sarin you breathe and it kills you.’
He added: ‘There were many who died on the stairs.
‘If it was chlorine, they could have escaped. But they died after just taking a few steps.’
Hamish de Bretton- Gordon, a former British army officer and chemical weapons expert, said: ‘What they’re describing is chlorine and what we suspect is a nerve agent mixed with chlorine.’