Victims of chemical attacks in Syria speak freely for the first time

Tawfiq Diam is excited because it is the first time he can speak freely about what happened to his family in 2018, in Douma, in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

“If I had spoken earlier, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut out my tongue. They would have slit my throat. We were not allowed to talk about it,” he says.

Tawfiq’s wife and four children aged between eight and 12 (Joudy, Mohammed, Ali and Qamar) were killed in a chemical attack on April 7, 2018.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global watchdog, said in a report last year that it believed a Syrian air force helicopter took off from the nearby Dumayr air base shortly after 7 p.m.: 00 hours that day and threw two yellow cylinders that hit two apartment buildings and released highly concentrated chlorine gas.

Tawfiq said his family was right outside their house on the ground floor when the bombs fell.

“I heard an explosion and people were shouting in the streets ‘chemicals, chemicals’. I ran out. There was a foul smell. I saw yellow foam coming out of people’s mouths. My children couldn’t breathe, they were drowning. I saw people lying in the street,” he says.

The OPCW says at least 43 people were killed. Tawfiq says there were more than 100 dead.

“Even I almost died. I was in the hospital for 10 days. Only five or six men in this compound survived,” he says.

Assad’s government denied ever using chemical weapons. And its ally Russia said the attack on Douma was “staged.”

Eastern Ghouta was one of the most disputed areas for five long years during the Syrian civil war.

The regime eventually laid siege to it and, along with its ally Russia, indiscriminately bombed the area as it attempted to wrest control from rebel fighters led by the Jaish al-Islam group.

As we pass through it now, the destruction wrought upon it is all around us. It is difficult to find a single building that does not bear the scars of war, many of them so badly bombed that they are nothing more than shells of structures.

On more than one occasion, chemical weapons – prohibited by the Geneva Protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention – were used to attack Douma in Eastern Ghouta.

Bashar al-Assad’s forces captured Douma shortly after the chlorine attack, and the victims’ stories were never fully heard.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my children,” Tawfiq says, taking out the only photograph she has of them, her eyes full of tears.

As we talk to Tawfiq, more people come to us to tell their stories.

Khalid Naseer says his daughter Nour, two-year-old son Omar and his pregnant wife Fatima also died in the 2018 chlorine attack.

“Those killed were mostly children and women.”

The anger he has had to suppress for six years comes out.

“The whole world knows that Bashar al-Assad is an oppressor and a liar, and that he killed his own people. My wife was murdered two days before giving birth to our baby,” he shouts, his emotions running high. .

The chlorine gas attack was not the only one in which chemical weapons were used in the area.

In 2013, rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were fired at several rebel-held suburbs in Eastern and Western Ghouta, killing hundreds of people. UN experts confirmed the use of sarin, but were not asked to assign blame.

Assad denied that his forces had fired the rockets, but agreed to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy Syria’s declared chemical arsenal.

Between 2013 and 2018, Human Rights Watch documented at least 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, accusing the Syrian government of being responsible for most of them.

In addition to Douma in 2018, the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team identified the Syrian army as the perpetrator of four other cases of chemical weapons use in 2017 and 2018. A previous fact-finding mission, which was not mandated to identify the authors, found Chemical weapons were used in 20 cases.

Khalid and Tawfiq took us to a hillock on the side of a road, a short drive away. They believe this is where the regime took the bodies of their relatives and buried them in a mass grave.

Looking down, among gravel, mud and stones, you can see pieces of bones, although it is not possible to determine if they are human remains.

“It’s the first time I set foot here, I swear to God. If I had tried to come earlier, they (the regime) would have executed me,” says Tawfiq.

“On Eid, when I was missing my family, I would go to the side of this road and quickly look at this (the mound). It would make me cry.”

Tawfiq wants the graves to be dug so he can give his family a dignified funeral.

“We want new investigations into the attack,” says Khalid. He says the testimony given by many to the OPCW fact-finding mission in 2019 was unreliable.

It is a statement corroborated by Abdul Rahman Hijazi, one of the witnesses who testified before the mission, who says that he was forced to give the regime’s version of events.

“Intelligence agents stopped me and told me to lie. They told me to say that people died from dust inhalation, not from chemicals. They threatened me that if I didn’t agree, my family wouldn’t be safe. They told me that My house was surrounded by men from the regime,” he said.

One of the conclusions of the 2019 OPCW report on Douma states: “Some witnesses claimed that many people died in hospital on April 7 as a result of intense shelling and/or asphyxiation from smoke and dust inhalation.”

Abdul Rahman says he and his family were shunned by the community for years after he gave his testimony. He found it difficult to get a job.

Now he also wants a new investigation.

“I want the truth to come out. I can’t sleep. I want justice for all parents.”

Additional reporting by Aamir Peerzada, Sanjay Ganguly and Leen Al Saadi