Syria’s government has been accused of using chlorine gas in an attack on the rebel-held city of Aleppo.
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Rescue workers also said that Syrian government helicopters dropped suspected chlorine bombs on the neighborhood on Tuesday.
At least 37 children and 10 women were among those hospitalized, the Aleppo Free Doctors Committee said in a statement. “Among the victims, 10 were critically injured, including a pregnant woman in her last trimester”.
Both sides in Syria’s complex civil war have traded accusations of attacks against civilians and use of unconventional weapons including chlorine and mustard gas.
The attack is the latest in a weeks-long effort by the Syrian government, backed by Russian Federation, to wrest control of rebel-held sections of Aleppo. The videos could not be independently verified by CBS News, but they mirrored many similar videos posted online after previous attacks also allegedly using chlorine.
Harrowing footage distributed by the Syrian Civil Defence shows wheezing children being rushed to the Basel Aslan hospital in the arms of rescuers, gasping desperately for air as they are given oxygen masks.
There was no independent confirmation of who carried out the attack or that chlorine was used; the Assad government and its armed opponents have accused each other of using chlorine as a weapon of war.
In at least one airstrike last week, government warplanes struck a van carrying displaced people fleeing Suran, a town north of Hama city, activists said. The security forces encircled Aleppo on July 17 after closing off the last terrorist-controlled route into the city.
A young child being treated following apparent chlorine attack in Aleppo.
The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Wednesday said one person had been killed and scores of others suffered from suffocation in an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian army against Sukkari neighborhood in eastern Aleppo on Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, the Turkish government said two Turkish soldiers were killed and five were injured in an attack by the Islamic State on two Turkish tanks in northern Syria.
The use of chlorine as a weapon of war is banned under global conventions.
A UN-led report found that the Assad regime has used chlorine bombs at least twice.
In late August, the United Nations investigators had concluded that Syrian military helicopters had poured chlorine gas in at least two locations in the province of Idleb in the northwest of Syria, Talmenes April 21, 2014 and Sarmin March 16, 2015. The city has been heavily hit by intensifying violence in recent months following the failure of an American- and Russian-brokered “cessation of hostilities”.
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Hashim al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Shi’ite militia Harakat al-Nujab, said its fighters would reinforce areas captured from the rebels in southern Aleppo.
