Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
New bombs ordeal for town gassed by Assad
A NEW bombing blitz yesterday pounded the same shattered Syrian town targeted by President Bashar alAssad’s horror chemical attack.
The airstrike by government regime jets openly defied a warning from the US that it would not tolerate further slaughter of innocent civilians.
The planes battered Idlib province with conventional bombs just hours after Donald Trump ordered his controversial missile attack on an airbase.
Locals in Khan Sheikhoun said the latest raid killed a woman, wounded three others and hit a health centre.
One resident of the town, where Tuesday’s Sarin gas attack claimed the lives of 87 including many children, said: “It is like Assad is trying to kill everyone who survived the chemicals.”
OUTLAWED
The Local Coordination Committees, a monitoring group, claimed the latest raid was carried out by Russian warplanes. It also said the dead woman had fled to the town from her home in Latameh, in central Syria.
The latest attack came as haunting pictures were released that gave the world a glimpse of the aftermath of the Sarin outrage.
They graphically showed rubble littering the shells of homes with battered furniture standing caked in debris.
Nearby scores of people were left writhing in agony and foaming at the mouth after breathing in a poisonous nerve agent outlawed under international agreement. Rescuers, who frantically dug through the debris to reach victims and doused them with water to dilute the effects of the gas, said civilians were deliberately targeted.
Abu Hamdo, a manager for the famed White Helmets of the Syrian Civil Defence, told us exclusively: “The air strikes totally targeted civilians. There were no military gatherings, checkpoints or convoys.
“They weren’t targeting a headquarters or even a house of a military leader.
“It was totally civilian. Most of the victims were women and children. They targeted the most vulnerable, not men who are able to escape and survive.”
Describing the scenes,
Abu added: “The victims had a number of injuries. They were fainting, they were unconscious, some had a white substance foaming from the mouth and nose.
“Some of them were in spasm, their bodies were like wood. Some were so cold they were trembling.
“But the Civil Defence doesn’t have the ability to treat chemical injuries, we are only used to normal military injuries. And some of us were injured too.”
Three other airstrikes with nonchemical bombs hit the area in 12 hours of mayhem, killing and wounding nearly 500.
Among the injured were families believed to have fled the carnage of besieged Aleppo, where Assad’s forces had relentlessly bombed the eastern district. One nurse at the Al Rahma hospital said of the Sarin bombing: “The sound was not what we are used to – my colleagues and I thought it hadn’t gone off, because it made a thump not an explosion.
“A few minutes later the first victims were brought in and then the flow kept going for hours.
“There were huge numbers of people being brought in and only four of us at the hospital at the time.
“Victims had vomit from the nose and mouth and paralysis – they couldn’t swallow. Children died faster than adults.” A doctor at a specialised surgery unit 30 miles away, where more victims were brought, said: “They reached us with paralysis, white secretions from the nose and mouth and severe muscular pain.
“We had only one child who, thank God, survived.”
Medics have repeatedly claimed in recent months that Assad was using chemical weapons.
In August 2013, a suspected poison attack killed hundreds on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.
Last month Dr Zahed Katurji, the last medic to flee Aleppo, insisted that chemical bombs were still being used despite the regime government claiming to have brokered a ceasefire.