Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria used chemical weapons on a massive scale in rebel-held areas near Damascus that killed as many as 1,429 people including 426 children, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday as the US released intelligence assessment on the alleged atrocity.
“The US Government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children. Even the first-responders, the doctors, nurses and medics who tried to save them became victims themselves. We saw them gasping for air, terrified that their own lives were in danger,” Kerry told presspersons.
He was speaking soon after the White House released a report on its intelligence assessment of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime during the August 21 attack.
“This is the indiscriminate, inconceivable horror of chemical weapons. This is what Assad did to his own people,” Kerry said.
“We know that the Assad regime has the largest chemical weapons programmes in the entire Middle East. We know that the regime has used those weapons multiple times this year, and has used them on a smaller scale but still it has used them against its own people, including not very far from where last Wednesday’s attack happened,” Kerry said.
“We know that the regime was specifically determined to rid the Damascus suburbs of the opposition, and it was frustrated that it hadn’t succeeded in doing so. We know that for three days before the attack, the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons personnel were on the ground in the area, making preparations,” he said.
“We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons with specific instructions. We know where the rockets were launched from, and at what time. We know where they landed, and when. We know rockets came only from regime-held areas and went only to rebel or contested neighbourhoods,” he said.
“And we know, as does the world, that just 90 minutes later all hell broke loose in the social media. With our own eyes we have seen the thousands of reports from 11 separate sites in the Damascus suburbs,” he said.
“All of them show and report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness, and death.
And we know it was ordinary Syrian citizens who reported all of these horrors,” Kerry said.
“Just as important, we know what the doctors and the nurses who treated them didn’t report — not a scratch, not a shrapnel wound, not a cut, not a gunshot sound. We saw rows of dead lined up in burial shrouds, the white linen unstained by a single drop of blood,” he said.
“Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at home, we saw rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad’s gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate,” he said.