‘Death was everywhere’: Syria’s chemical weapons victims share their trauma | Syrian war news

Eastern Ghouta, Syria Amina Habiyeh was still awake when she heard screaming outside her window in Zamalka, Ghouta, on the night of August 21, 2013.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime had just fired missiles filled with sarin gas into Zamalka, and people were screaming: “Chemical weapons attack!” Chemical weapons attack!

She quickly soaked a towel in water and held it to her nose as she ran to the fifth — and highest — floor of the building where she lives with her daughters and in-laws.

Because chemicals are usually heavier than air, Habie knew that the upper levels of buildings might be less polluted.

They were safe, but Habia later discovered that her husband and son, who were not home, and her daughter-in-law and two children, who were sleeping, had died of suffocation.

“Death was everywhere,” said 60-year-old Habia, sitting on a plastic chair outside her home, wearing a black abaya, a black veil and a black shawl around her face.

Habia still lives in Zamalka in a modest one-story apartment with her married daughters, grandchildren, and in-laws. Their building is one of the few undamaged in the neighborhood.

The other areas were leveled to the ground as a result of air strikes launched by the regime during the war.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, she uploaded a picture of eight children wrapped in black blankets. The bodies were recovered after the sarin gas attack, and they had suffocated to death.

Two of them were her grandchildren.

Pointing to two dead children in the photo, she told Al Jazeera: “This is my granddaughter and this is my granddaughter.”

About 1,127 people were killed in the attacks, while 6,000 others suffered severe respiratory symptoms, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

“(Rescuers) found five people dead in the bathroom. Some (bodies) were found on the stairs and some on the floor. “Others (died) while they were sleeping,” Habia said.

The legacy of chemical warfare

On December 8, Assad fled to Russia with his family before opposition fighters could reach the capital.

For 13 years, he and his family waged a devastating war against their people, rather than handing over power to the popular uprising against him that began in March 2011.

The Assad regime has systematically launched air attacks on civilians, starved communities, and tortured and killed tens of thousands of real and perceived dissidents.

But the system Use of chemical weapons These operations – prohibited by international laws and agreements – are perhaps one of the darkest aspects of the conflict.

According to a 2019 report by the World Policy Institute, the Syrian regime carried out 98 percent of 336 chemical weapons attacks during the war, while the rest were attributed to ISIS.

The report said the confirmed attacks occurred over a six-year period between 2012 and 2018 and typically targeted rebel-controlled areas as part of a broader policy of collective punishment.

Towns and areas on the outskirts of Damascus were bombed dozens of times, as well as villages in governorates such as Homs, Idlib, and the Damascus countryside.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that about 1,514 people died of suffocation in these attacks, including 214 children and 262 women.

In Eastern Ghouta, victims told Al Jazeera they still cannot shake the horrific memory, even as they are filled with joy and relief that Assad is finally gone.

Joy and despair

Before the war, Habia says, she neither hated nor loved Assad, but she became terrified when the regime began brutally repressing protesters — and uninvolved civilians.

In early 2013, regime officers kidnapped and imprisoned her son while he was praying in his shop. Months later, they killed her son’s family in a chemical weapons attack.

Habia never saw her son again, and had just discovered that he had died in the notorious Sednaya prison in 2016.

Habia believes that the regime has particularly oppressed and persecuted civilians in Ghouta because it is located on the doorstep of Damascus and was seized by the rebels.

“We have become very afraid,” Habia told Al Jazeera. “The mere name ‘Bashar al-Assad’ would strike fear into all of us.”

While the Assad regime committed a growing list of atrocities, then-US President Barack Obama told reporters in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line” that — if crossed — would force him to use military force in Syria. Syria.

After the sarin gas attack in August 2013. Obama was under pressure to follow through on his warningWhich risked angering his voters who believed that the United States should not interfere in foreign conflicts.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted between August 29 and September 1 of that year, only 29% of Obama’s Democratic base believed that the United States should strike Syria, while 48% opposed it. completely. The rest were unsure.

Ultimately, Obama called off the strikes and accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to allow the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — a United Nations body — to destroy chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria.

Although the OPCW had eliminated many of the chemical weapons the Syrian government claimed it possessed by the time it concluded its initial mission on September 30, 2014, the UN body said the government may have hidden some stockpiles.

Following the regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons in war, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons took the decision to suspend Syria’s membership in the Chemical Weapons Convention in April 2021 for failing to meet its obligations.

Hungry for justice

The lack of repercussions against the regime has angered Syrians, with many victims of the 2013 attack still looking for justice.

Habia’s daughter, Iman Suleiman, 33, stuck her head out the side of the door and told Al Jazeera she wanted the international community to help hold Assad accountable for his horrific crimes, suggesting the International Criminal Court could indict him.

However, Syria is not currently a member of the Rome Statute, a treaty that grants jurisdiction to the court. The only way the ICC can open a case in Syria is if the new authorities sign and ratify the statute, or if the UN Security Council issues a resolution allowing the court to investigate atrocities committed in Syria.

It is theoretically possible that Assad and his closest aides could be charged with a long list of serious violations, including the use of chemical weapons, which could amount to a crime against humanity, according to Human Rights Watch.

In November 2023, French judges approved an arrest warrant against Assad, accusing him of ordering the use of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta.

The warrant was granted under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” which enables any country to prosecute alleged war criminals for serious crimes committed anywhere in the world.

Suleiman told Al Jazeera: “We want to see (Al-Assad) tried, sentenced, and held accountable.”

“We just want our rights. Nothing more, nothing less. In any country in the world, if a person kills another person, he is held accountable,” she said.

But even if some form of justice is achieved, no sentence or prison sentence will bring back the dead, says Habia.

She sighed, saying: “God will punish every oppressor.”

Talk out

Five years after the first chemical weapons attack, the Assad regime committed another attack in Eastern Ghouta on April 7, 2018.

This time, chlorine gas was used, killing about 43 people and wounding dozens, according to a report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Both Assad and his main ally, Russia Syrian rebel groups and rescue workers claimed to have carried out the attack.

They reportedly intimidated and gagged victims after seizing Eastern Ghouta days later.

Tawfiq Deem, 45, said regime officers “visited” his home a week after his wife and four children – Judy, Muhammad, Ali and Qamar, aged between 8 and 12 – were killed in a chlorine attack.

“They told us that they did not use chemical weapons, but that terrorists and armed groups did,” Diem recalls with dismay.

Deem added that regime officials brought in a journalist from a Russian network who requested an interview about the chemical weapons attack.

He said he told the journalist and security officers what they wanted to hear under duress.

Now, he says, he can finally speak freely about the attack after living in fear of the regime for so long.

Habia agrees, saying that the fear she carried in her heart under Assad’s rule disappeared when he fled.

She remembers feeling happy when she asked dozens of young people outside her home why they were so happy and celebrating on December 8.

“They told me: The donkey Bashar has finally left.”