The Syrian Civil Defense Corps said that dozens of civilians suffered from asphyxiation after regime forces bombed the town of Douma in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta with rockets loaded with chlorine gas in the early morning hours of Thursday.
Local activists said that civil defense teams rushed the injured to medical centers in the rebel-held district.
The Civil Defense said that one of its volunteers was injured when regime forces shelled the targeted area as rescue workers were rescuing the injured.
The Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile has been linked for the first time by laboratory tests to the largest sarin nerve agent attack in Syria, diplomats and scientists told Reuters in late January.
Laboratories working for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons compared samples taken by a UN mission in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta after the Aug. 21, 2013 attack, when hundreds of civilians died of sarin gas poisoning, to chemicals handed over by the Assad regime for destruction in 2014.
France and around 30 other countries launched an initiative to prosecute and hold accountable those responsible for using chemical weapons in Syria during a conference held in Paris in January.
The Syrian Coalition has repeatedly called upon the international community to take action to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria and hold those responsible to account.
The Coalition stressed that the regime and its backers “will not change their criminal behavior or stop violating international resolutions as well as the use of chemical weapons and the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity unless they pay a real price for their atrocious crimes.” (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department + Agencies)
