Whether one believes that action — military or otherwise — should or should not be taken against the Assad regime for launching chemical attacks on its own people; whether one believes that it is or is not any of our business that innocent men, women and babies have died or are dying most horrific deaths as a result of those attacks; whether one believes that we are feigning sympathy for these gassed children for political or economic reasons, one should read a piece by AP writers Zeia Karam and Basem Mroue.
They write about the strange whistling noise the rockets made as they came in, followed by the sound of people screaming, and how hundreds of suffocating, twitching victims — the “lucky ones” — flooded into makeshift hospitals, others were found dead in their homes, “towels still on their faces from their last moments trying to protect themselves.”
They recount what a survivor did and saw when he heard “a screeching sound unlike anything he had heard before, followed by the sound of people screaming on Rawda street below his apartment. Once outside, he said, he saw a gas with a faint green color. It “stung my eyes like needles.”
“I ran out to see what was going on and saw people in various stages of suffocation and convulsions. I tried to help, but then my legs buckled and I fell to the ground,” he said.
Ammar was lucky. He woke up at a makeshift hospital, “where he said he spent five days getting water, oxygen and injections of atropine, which can be used to counteract the effects of nerve gases.”
A week later, Ammar is still not fully recovered. “He suffers bouts of cold sweats, exhaustion, hallucinations and a runny nose. Worst of all, he said, were the nightmares,” write Karam and Mroue.
“I can’t sleep anymore. I keep seeing the people who died, the scenes from the hospital of people twitching and foaming. I can never forget that,” said Ammar, 30, who worked in the clothing business before the war and now is a government opponent who sometimes deals with the media.
Another survivor, Zakarya, was taken to the hospital by friends where he fainted.
When he came to, doctors were injecting him with atropine and he started vomiting. “Strange colors came out of my stomach,” the man said. He fainted again and later woke up in the street outside in his underwear, apparently moved out to make room for others, says the AP.
According to the AP:
To the east of Damascus, some 600 patients poured into a makeshift hospital in the district of Arbeen, most of them from the nearby Zamalka area, said Abu Akram, a 32-year-old doctor at the facility. Of those, 125 died, including 35 children, he said.
He said the signs – twitching, foaming at the mouth and nose, constricted pupils – were all clear signs of a kind of nerve gas.
Most of the first arrivals were alive, he said. They were stripped down to their underwear, and doctors poured water on them to avoid contamination. Late arrivals who had been exposed to the gas for a longer time, he said, came in dead. Many of them were children.
“They have a much smaller and weaker respiratory system,” he explained.
Abu Akram said he was told by several medics that some people were found in their homes, with wet towels on their faces or hiding with their children in bathrooms.
“People didn’t die in their sleep; they tried to save themselves,” he said, speaking from the eastern suburb of Arbeen, via Skype.
I know that reading about these atrocities will not change peoples’ minds, but it just might make them understand why some — perhaps mistakenly or naively so — want this massacre to stop and never to happen again.
And we haven’t even shown the images of the children who might remind us of our own sons and daughters, of our own grandchildren…
Read more here
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The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.