DOUMA, Syria: At least 21 people, including children, suffered breathing difficulties Monday, a monitor said, in a suspected Syrian regime chemical attack on a besieged rebel enclave near Damascus.
United Nations inspectors have accused President Bashar al-Assad´s regime of being behind multiple deadly poison gas attacks during the country´s devastating seven year war. Monday´s attack targeted the city of Douma in the rebel-held region of Eastern Ghouta, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"After regime forces fired rockets into the western part of the city of Douma, white smoke spread, causing 21 cases of suffocation," it said. An AFP correspondent at a hospital in the city saw people carrying babies wrapped in blankets, breathing through oxygen masks, some of them screaming. Young girls and men sat on hospital beds, tears in their eyes, unable to stop coughing.
A doctor at the hospital who gave his first name as Bassil said patients were suffering "respiratory irritation, breathing difficulties, coughing and reddening of the eyes". "We noticed that they smelled like bleach, or chlorine, and we stripped them of their clothes," he said. Six children and six women were among those affected, the Observatory said "Residents and medical sources talk of chlorine gas," Observatory hear Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding that his group -- which relies on a network of sources inside Syria could not confirm those reports. On January 13, a similar attack targeted the outskirts of Douma and the Observatory reported seven cases of suffocation.
