Video has emerged showing residents of the Syrian city of Aleppo, including children, coughing and wheezing after medical workers say the Assad regime dropped a chlorine gas bomb on a rebel-held neighborhood on Tuesday.
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Assad’s use of chlorine as a weapon violates the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2235, which calls for global action in the case of continued chemical weapons use by the Syrian dictator.
“Units of our armed forces in co-operation with allied forces control the gas works, the tannery, the slaughterhouse, the post office and the military checkpoint area of Ramousah in Aleppo”, a Syrian military source had said earlier.
Earlier last month, Russian Federation said Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki militant group, considered by Washington as “moderate opposition”, launched poisonous materials from Sukkari toward the eastern part of Aleppo, leaving seven people dead and over 20 others injured.
The world’s chemical weapons watchdog will investigate the suspected use of chlorine gas in an opposition area of the Syrian city of Aleppo, calling reports of the latest gas attack disturbing.
This chemical attack poisoned 37 children; one girl, Hajer Kyali, 13, died on Wednesday.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks daily developments in the Syrian war, said more than 70 people in Sukkari were left choking and needed treatment after the dropping of barrel bombs by Syrian government helicopters.
A video obtained by Al Jazeera showed what activists say was the aftermath of an attack that caused at least one death and dozens of cases of suffocation. “Everyone was scared”, said Mr Abdulkafi Hamdo, an Aleppo activist who arrived in the area shortly after the attack.
A year-long United Nations and OPCW inquiry into Syria, unanimously authorised by the 15-member Security Council, focused on nine gas attacks in seven areas and determined that Syrian government troops were responsible for two of them, in 2014 and 2015.
Five years after the multi-sided war began, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and 11 million – half of Syria’s pre-war population – displaced.
But Russia has blocked the use of those sanctions against the Syrian government, which denies it was responsible.
President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been backed by Russian airpower.
Al-Hamdo said that some people at the scene had reached such a level of despair – having concluded that publicizing such attacks brings no help from the outside world and may even bring more danger – that they tried to stop him from filming.
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The rebels captured several districts in eastern Aleppo and kept trying to expand their presence to government-controlled areas in the west.
