Despite its pledge to eliminate chemical weapons, the Assad regime is attacking towns and villages with chlorine gas bombs. SPIEGEL visited the communities hit by the most recent bombings to interview victims, doctors and eyewitnesses.
The green wheat fields shimmer in the late afternoon light as the wind slowly starts to pick up. A cloud of dust drifts by. This is good, says Abu Abdu, a farmer from the village of Telminnes, located deep in the south of Syria's Idlib province. Prior to the war, the evening wind had been an annoyance for the dust it kicked up. But these days, it is windless nights that people in the area despise. That's when air force helicopters come and the gas attacks take place. Often, they circle over the city before dropping their cargo.
Usually, there is no big bang, just the sound of a minor detonation, sometimes even just the thud of an impact. Death comes quietly, as it did on the evening of April 21 in Telminnes.
That's the evening a bomb landed near Abu Abdu's garden. The farmer says the explosion was a quiet one. "I thought the point of impact was far away," he recalls. The bomb, which carried a small amount of explosives and a gas cylinder, fell close by -- so close that Abu Abdu could already see the cloud before he had the chance to flee. "Yellow vapor rose, it smelled strongly of chlorine and it burned like fire. I could no longer speak or breathe," he says. Neighbors took him to a makeshift hospital where he was treated with oxygen and an anticonvulsant. "Hours later, I could still barely move my arms, I was coughing up blood and every breath I took was hellish."
Between 200 and 300 people went to hospital in Telminnes that night, suffering from burns in their respiratory passages, difficulty breathing and eye irritation. None showed signs of external injuries. Abu Abdu and others were then transferred to hospitals in the north. The patients suffering the worst injuries were taken to Turkey, where two children later died.
Abu Abdu has since returned home, but he still suffers from coughing fits. Every night he hopes the wind will blow; the regime, he says, won't risk a chlorine gas attack in such conditions. "Maybe they're afraid for their soldiers in Wadi Deif," he says. The province's largest army base is located only a few kilometers south of Telminnes.
Assad Doesn't Have to Hand Over Chlorine
Although Damascus has turned over 92.5 percent of its chemical weapons stockpile, including sarin, as agreed, it continues to deploy poison gas against the Syrian people. Given chlorine's use in everyday products, it isn't included in the list of weapons the regime has agreed to place under international control. Its deployment against humans is nonetheless prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Syria is a signatory.
At least 10 chlorine gas attacks have been carried out since April 10 in the border areas of the Idlib and Hama provinces, including one in Telminnes, three in Al-Tamana'a and six in the small city Kfar Zeita and the surrounding area.
