WE MUST NOT LOOK AWAY
Syrian regime in gas attack on children Trump’s 1st instinct: Blame Bam
Syria’s Assad slaughters kids with gas
DOZENS OF innocent victims, including at least 11 children, foamed at the mouth and convulsed in the streets as planes doused their Syrian town in a suspected chemical gas attack.
The death toll climbed to 100 — including seven shirtless young boys, their bodies piled in a makeshift hospital — after the Tuesday morning attack as many residents of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province were sleeping, authorities said.
“It was a horrible scene,” activist Mohammad Alshagel of the Aleppo Media Center told ABC News. “Children were crying, asking for their parents who had died, and women were screaming.”
Volunteer medics washed the chemicals from victims’ bodies with a hose as residents of the opposition-held town awoke at 6:30 a.m. to loud explosions and unimaginable carnage.
Estimates of the injured ran as high as 200 in what could become the most lethal chemical attack in Syria since a 2013 sarin gas attack that left 1,300 dead in a Damascus suburb.
A local doctor told CNN that the symptoms of 125 people brought to his hospital were consistent with the use of sarin gas. Officials in Idlib Province estimated at least 100 dead.
Alshagel said some of the victims were beyond help when they arrived at the makeshift facility in the Syrian town.
“The injured had heavy choking symptoms, and some of them died five minutes after arriving, even though medical staff tried to help them,” said Alshagel.
Human rights groups and chemical weapons watchdogs announced they had dispatched fact-finding teams to the area to determine exactly what happened.
President Trump condemned the attack and ripped his White House predecessor, laying the blame at the feet of ex-President Barack Obama.
“These heinous actions by the Bashar Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution,” Trump said in a statement.
Witnesses described Sukhoi jets used by the Russian and Syrian governments flying over the town — although both nations denied any involvement in the attack.
Photographer Hussein
Kayal said entire families were paralyzed and pinned in their homes by the choking gas, left staring blankly with eyes wide open.
The Assad government specifically said it had no chemical weapons in its possession. The Syrians, after the 2013 attack, agreed to destroy its arsenal of chemical weapons.
Skeptics have long questioned whether Assad held back portions of his lethal weapons in cutting the deal. And Secretary of State Tillerson made it clear that he did not believe the Syrian strongman.
The attack demonstrates that the Assad regime rules “with brutal, unabashed barbarism . . . a fundamental disregard for human decency,” said Tillerson, who also blamed Assad allies Russia and Iran for the horror.
Russia and Iran, which had brokered a ceasefire with the Syrian government, “bear great responsibility for these deaths,” Tillerson said.
Just four days ago, Trump press secretary Sean Spicer said the U.S. — in a sharp reversal of Obama’s policy — was no longer leaning on Assad to surrender his power.
Dr. Shajul Islam, a humanitarian worker in northern Syria, posted a 10-minute video Tuesday of emergency workers rushing victims to a local hospital.
Islam points out most of the victims in the video have “pinpoint pupils” and their eyes are not sensitive to light — both symptoms of sarin gas, he says.
Near the end of the video, Islam says the hospital is at capacity and has run out of ventilators — forcing the facility to turn wounded people away.
Rebel-held Idlib Province is home to some 900,000 displaced Syrians, according to the United Nations. Rebels and opposition officials had expressed concerns that the government was planning to mount a concentrated attack on the crowded province.
British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft labeled the attack “clearly a war crime” and called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.