Syrian troops attacked town with chlorine — activists

BEIRUT — Syrian activists and opposition members claimed on Tuesday that government helicopters carried out a chlorine gas attack on a northern town overnight, killing six people — an accusation that was promptly dismissed by a military official.

Two activist groups — the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees — said the attack late on Monday night targeted the town of Sarmin in northwestern Idlib province.

They said that apart from the six dead, dozens more suffered from breathing difficulties after the gas attack. The two groups collect their data from a network of activists on the ground.

A military official in the capital, Damascus, denied the claim and blamed rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad for the attack. "The army did not and will never use any internationally-prohibited weapon," the official said.

Sarmin is 8 kilometres east of the provincial capital of Idlib which is under government control.

Monday's purported attack with chlorine would be one of the deadliest uses of poison gas in Syria since August 2013, when Assad's forces were blamed by the US government for a chemical weapons attack near Damascus that killed hundreds. Damascus also blamed opposition fighters for that attack.

An opposition medical official in the area of Sarmin said there were two attacks, the first targeting rebels that injured 20 people, mostly men, while the second hit a residential area. He said the six dead were all part of one family, including three young children.

The military and the opposition medical official both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to reporters.

The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, said that in the Sarmin attack, helicopter gunships dropped four "barrel bombs", of which two contained chlorine gas. The coalition and the opposition official said about 70 people suffered breathing problems.

Amateur videos posted online and claiming to be from the attack show three children lying on hospital beds as medics try to assist them. 

The footage shows an apparently dazed child slowly moving his head while lying on a hospital bed. The lifeless body of a woman lies on another bed.

Another video showed some bearded men inside what appeared to be a hospital room as paramedics put oxygen masks on their faces.

The video, which could not be independently verified, appeared genuine and corresponded to other reports of the events depicted.

Asad Kanjo, an activist who is based in the nearby town of Saraqeb, said that after the first bomb was dropped, Sarmin residents were called upon through local mosque loudspeakers to head for their roofs in order to avoid inhaling the gas.

“There was some kind of chaos,” Kanjo said via Skype adding that residents usually avoid going up to the roofs for fear of being targeted by government aircraft.

Pro-opposition media said some residents of Sarmin fled to nearby fields.

The attack came nearly two weeks after the UN Security Council approved a United States-drafted resolution that condemns the use of toxic chemicals such as chlorine in Syria, while threatening militarily action in case of further violations.

The resolution followed last month’s condemnation by the world’s chemical weapons watchdog of the use of chlorine in Syria as a breach of international law. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ fact-finding mission concluded “with a high degree of confidence” that chlorine was used on three villages in Syria last year, killing 13 people.

The resolution threatens action against further violations under a 2013 Security Council resolution that banned Syria’s use of chemical weapons. It applies to any party in the Syrian conflict, now in its fifth year. The civil war has so far killed an estimated 220,000 people, according to UN figures.

Earlier Tuesday, a leading international rights group criticised Syrian government bombings last November that targeted the de-facto capital of Daesh terror group, saying the air strikes killed dozens of civilians and may amount to war crimes.

Amnesty International said in a statement that it has documented a series of Syrian government air strikes between November 11 and Nov. 29 that killed up to 115 civilians, including 14 children, in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. On November 25, The Associated Press reported that at least 60 people were killed in air strikes that day in Raqqa.

Raqqa has been the stronghold of Daesh since it declared a caliphate in areas under its control in Iraq and Syria.