Juan Cole: articles on Syria

Washington’s Supreme Hypocrisy on Chemical Weapons and Civilian Deaths

Juan Cole

https://www.juancole.com/2017/04/washingtons-hypocrisy-chemical.html

The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army in Idlib is an atrocity and the pictures of dead children tug at the heart. But the outrage of American politicians inside the beltway about it draws on the myths of American exceptionalism and Alzheimer’s of the political memory. It is also very suspicious in that the loudest voices of sympathy are the ones closest to the US military industrial complex, which has been regretting the missed opportunity of a Syria War.
If Trump and his circle are so tenderhearted, why did they propose, on taking office, permanently banning Syrian refugees from the United States? If it weren’t for some feisty Federal court judges, the Syrian refugee ban would be in effect. How sympathetic can you be if you don’t even want to give children asylum from these heinous atrocities?
Then, why is how children are killed in war more important than that they are killed? The most conservative estimate for deaths in the Syrian Civil War is some 300,000, and you figure that although many of those are fighting men, some large proportion (33%?) are innocent noncombatants, including tens of thousands of children. Rebel groups have also killed tens of thousands of people, including innocent civilians, though the regime has been more deadly because better-armed. Why was it all right for the regime to use indiscriminate bombing and barrel bombs on civilian neighborhoods, but if they kill some 80 people with gas all of a sudden the Beltway Bandits want to Send in Trump?
And by the way, all the time the US was occupying Iraq, 2003-2011, it was intensively bombing civilian neighborhoods to get at Iraqi militias. It certainly killed thousands of innocent civilians this way, including children. I can remember just one Saturday afternoon in 2004, the US bombed Amara over and over again to get at the Shiite Mahdi Army militia. The Agence France Presse had a stringer on the ground who reported 84 deaths. They weren’t all combatants. The US media refused to run the AFP report.
All this isn’t new. The US has long had a doctrine that it is all right to inflict large civilian casualties with the aim of limited troop casualties. The United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which there were thousands and thousands of dead children. Some were carbonized so quickly that nothing was left of them but shadows on the wall. Little children. The US security elite has never apologized for this war crime and continues to menace other nations with this kind of indiscriminate and unspeakable violence every time it announces that “all options are on the table.”
As for chemical weapons, the US has studiedly avoided signing unreservedly the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons use. (It says it will use chem if others do, which means it could use chem in Syria now).
The Reagan administration shamefully ran interference for six years as Saddam Hussein of Iraq systematically deployed chemical weapons against Iranian troops at the front. Everyone knew this was going on. After then Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in 1983 and famously shook Saddam’s hand, George Schultz’s State Department complained about Saddam’s chem, provoking angry puzzlement in Baghdad. Did Reagan want a new ally against Khomeini’s Iran, or not? Reagan had State back down. And, indeed, when Iran appealed to the United Nations Security Council to condemn what Iraq was doing, the Reagan administration maneuvered at the UN to make sure that Iran’s case was not taken up.
I saw an Iranian survivor interviewed. He said he wished he had been killed instead. His lungs had been permanently scarred by mustard gas, and every breath he took was pure torture. Imagine how many breaths a person draws every day.
Emboldened by Reagan’s running cover for him at the UN, Saddam went on to have his relative “Chemical Ali” al-Tikriti use sarin gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja. Again, lots of little children were among the thousands dead. Some were walking to school and their little hands were still grasping lunch pails. George H. W. Bush was vice president and must have been in the loop. His son, W., later invaded Iraq and gave as one of his pretexts that Saddam had used ‘weapons of mass destruction’ on ‘his own people.’
Iraq used chemical weapons for the same reason that the Syrian army does. They are deployed to level the playing field in the face of superior manpower on the other side. Saddam Hussein had a country of 16 million and invaded a country of some 40 million. US military doctrine of the time was you should only invade at a ratio of 3 to 1. So Saddam would have needed a country of 120 million to invade Iran. Needless to say, he lost the war very badly after an initial lightning invasion, since Iran could always over time raise a much bigger army than Saddam could. Hence the use of mustard gas and sarin gas on Iranian troops at the front.
Some Syrian military units have a chem team in case they face being overwhelmed by a more numerous enemy. The Syrian army was 300,000 before the war. It is at most 50,000 now. That number is not sufficient to control the whole country, though with the help of the Lebanese Hizbullah and Iraqi militias and some Afghans dragooned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, plus vigorous Russian air support, they have been able to fight off the rebels and to take most urban areas. The small number of troops means that when they fight in a rebel-held territory like Idlib Province, they are tempted to deploy chemical weapons to offset their small numbers.
But it is indiscriminate fire and reckless disregard for innocent life that is the war crime here, and indeed a repeated pattern of war crimes is considered a crime against humanity.
By the way, Russian bombing has often been indiscriminate, but somehow Moscow has skated on war crimes accusations growing out of its heavy-handed role in Syria.
As for those decrying Obama inaction they need to, like, read the news sometime. For the past several years the US has intervened in Syria in two ways. President Obama used the Saudis to deliver money and weaponry to some 40 “vetted” groups supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, which is certified as having no ties to al-Qaeda or international extremism. Except that several of these groups have in fact formed battlefield alliances with al-Qaeda in Syria (was Jabhat al-Nusra, now Jabhat Fateh Sham or the Syrian Conquest Front).
Why in the world the US government should have backed groups like the Saudi favorite Army of Islam, which wanted to oppress or kill non-Sunnis baffles me. The rebel groups committed their own massacres of civilians.
The other US intervention has been thousands of bombing raids against Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria’s far east.
Neither of these interventions has been effective to date, and both certainly have raised the death toll in the Civil War, including the civilian death toll.
Trump can’t stop Syria from using poison gas by bombing Damascus. Since he’s such a good buddy of Russian president Vladimir Putin, maybe he could pressure Putin to have Bashar al-Assad cut it out.
But that somehow the Syria situation can be made better if only Donald J. Trump would stick his fingers into it is a wildly implausible premise.

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link: http://aranews.net/2017/04/chemical-attack-kills-dozens-northern-syria/

Chemical attack kills dozens in northern Syria

April 4, 2017 Syria
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Syrian boy injured during a suspected regime-led chemical attack being moved to a hospital in Idlib. Activists

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Tags
Assad regimeBashar al-Assadchemical agentschemical attackchemical weaponsIdlibSNCSyriaSyrian oppositionSyrian regimevictims
At least 58 people, including 11 children, died in a suspected gas attack in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, local sources reported on Tuesday.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), people choked or fainted after the attack, while some were seen foaming at the mouth.

The SOHR said it had received the reports from medics on the ground in the town of Khan Sheikhoun.

Hours later, a small field hospital in the region was struck and destroyed, according to a civil defence worker in the area.

The Syrian National Coalition (SNC), the main opposition group, said planes from President Bashar al Assad’s military carried out the airstrikes.

It was not immediately clear if the deaths had been caused by the chemical weapons or injuries sustained in the airstrikes.

Videos purporting to show the aftermath circulated on social media.

One showed the bodies of several young children being covered with a blanket, while another showed men lifting a body into the back of a truck.

In a number of videos, medics could be seen helping people who appeared to have breathing difficulties.

Rescue workers were pictured hosing down children.

More than 60 people were reportedly injured in the airstrikes.

“At 18 cases had been taken to a hospital in Sarmin town. Because of the number of wounded, they have been distributed around in rural Idlib,” local media activist Mohammed Hassoun said.

“They were unconscious, they had seizures and when oxygen was administered, they bled from the nose and mouth.”

Russia’s defence ministry said it had not carried out any airstrikes in the area.

The Syrian government did not immediately comment on the allegations, but last week said claims the government was using chemical weapons were “devoid of truth”.

The SNC called for an emergency session of the UN Security Council, blaming the airstrikes on the “regime of the criminal Bashar”.

It urged the UN to “open an immediate investigation and take the necessary measures to ensure the officials, perpetrators and supporters are held accountable”.

“Failure to do so will be understood as a message of blessing to the regime for its actions,” it added.

France later also said that it wanted an emergency Security Council meeting.

“The perpetrators must be held accountable. We need to address this issue at the Security Council, as soon as possible,” Alexis Lamek, Deputy Permanent Representative of France to the UN, said.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said: “This bears all the hallmarks of an attack by the regime, which has repeatedly used chemical weapons.”

“If this is shown to be the work of the regime, it is further evidence of the atrocities perpetrated against the Syrian people over six years of appalling conflict,” Johnson said.

Idlib province is almost entirely controlled by the Syrian opposition and is home to 900,000 people displaced from other areas by the 6-year-old war.

In 3 months, Trump has Charged into 4 Mideast Wars, to no Avail

Juan Cole

https://www.juancole.com/2017/04/months-charged-mideast.html

In his less than three months in office, Donald Trump has escalated four wars, and all of his escalations have been failures.
To be fair, Trump inherited all 4 wars from Barack Obama– Afghanistan, Iraq v. ISIL, Leftist Kurds v ISIL in Syria, and targeting support and tactical advice to Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Trump campaigned on reducing such foreign entanglements and focusing on the US and its needs. But in office he has declined to rethink any of these commitments and indeed has escalated in each theater.
Trump’s first escalation was in Yemen, in late January. He sent in a team of navy Seals to attack an alleged al-Qaeda compound. But the man he was targeting had switched sides and was supporting the Yemeni government. The raid produced no useful intelligence and the target disappeared. A navy Seal was killed along with some 30 civilians, including children. The raid did not further the Saudi war aim of defeating the Houthi militia– it was aimed at al-Qaeda in Yemen, which has taken advantage of the Saudi intervention to grab territory.
In Iraq in late March, once Trump came in, the restrictive rules of operation for the military insisted on by Obama were loosened by the US miltitary. A bombing by a US aircraft caused the collapse of a civilian apartment complex, killing at least 200 innocent civilians.
In Syria’s Northeastern Front, Trump doubled the number of US special ops troops embeded with the leftist Kurdish militia, the YPG. These forces are intended to attack ISIL in its Syrian capital, Raqqa, but despite promises by Trump, no such concerted new campaign has begun. Then when it appeared last week that the Syrian regime used poison gas in its struggle against the al-Qaeda affiliate and its allies in the Northwestern Front at Idlib, Trump dropped 59 Tomahawk missiles on a small airbase. No significant damage was done and Syria was flying missions again the next day.
On Thursday, Trump hit with an 1100 ton bomb some caves in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, said to be being used by Taliban rebels who had joined ISIL. The US has lost 1/3 of Afghanistan to fundamentalist rebels, mostly Taliban, in a 16-year war that is going worse now than than at any time since spring, 2002. There is no prospect of defeating guerrillas with air power, no matter how massive. The US carpet-bombed Vietnam and still lost. The desperation of the Trump administration is demonstrated by the use of old Saddam Hussein hyperbole, calling the missile ‘The Mother of all Bombs.’ Trump is actually translating his propaganda directly from Dictator Arabic! Saddam had called the Gulf War ‘the Mother of all Battles’ (Umm al-Ma’arik), though this was a literal press translation. The phrase means the ‘essence of all battles.’ Saddam’s hyperbole did not serve him well.
What all four Trump interventions in his ongoing US wars in the Middle East have in common is that they were splashy, produced headlines for a day, and altered the course of the conflict not a jot or a tittle.
Trump is gradually inducting his Four Wars into his Reality-Show universe, where everything is done for ratings and just for show.

wv wrote:

Cole said: “The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army in Idlib is an atrocity..”

But that has not been proven. Where is the clear and convincing evidence that the Syrian Army used chemical weapons?

The Russians and Assad say they didnt do it. The US says Assad did it. Where’s the proof?

w
v

No, it;s the Russians that deny it. “Has not been proven” is the Russian line. I actually published within all that a local independent middle eastern news source that accepts the line that it was syria. I’ve been insisting on this point: take views from those who are echoing the Russians on this, and it’s no help…it actually just muddies things.

Cole is without equal the leading american commentator on the region. I would take his view over anyone who is just parroting the Russians—any day.

Cole was a godsend of neutral deep commentary and reporting when I was looking at sources on the run up to the iraq war.

wv wrote:

You are accepting the Western mantra as proof.

All I see people doing is comparing the Russian/Assad account with the accounts from others, which are widespread and do not simply reduce to being pro-USA (Cole is deeply critical of USA policy). I like Cole because he reads outside the normal circles–he’s reading, for example middle eastern accounts.

I just don’t buy the Russian/Assad account for a second, I don’t pay any attention at all to the USA official account, and I look for people like Cole who are just simply not beholden to the USA account and think independently. That’s not “western.” I directly quoted a middle eastern account of this, one Cole cites.

Meanwhile every denial I see goes straight back to simply repeating Assad/The Russians. And I am no more going to take that version seriously than I was going to give Hussein any credence when I was looking into things leading to the run up to war.

None of this of course even touches on whether an American attack on Syria was warranted (it wasn’t) and whether or not the USA should be involved in Syria in any way shape or form (it shouldn’t).

It;s apparently very easy to find things repeating the Russian view. I challenge you to find things that are much more independent and outside the normal circles of the Russian OR the USA propaganda. The kinds of sources I am talking about (like Cole) have much more weight and value than some of the scattered commentators who echo the Russians.

I don’t buy the “no proof” line wv and I have given it consideration. I think it’s just the Russian view being echoed.

This for example is just the same old stuff repeated:

“…However, two new revelations contradict the Trump administration’s line on the April 4 attack. A former US official knowledgeable about the episode told Truthout that the Russians had actually informed their US counterparts in Syria of the Syrian military’s plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun 24 hours before the strike. And a leading analyst on military technology, Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT, has concluded that the alleged device for a sarin attack could not have been delivered from the air but only from the ground, meaning that the chemical attack may not have been the result of the Syrian airstrike….” see link

That’s just the Russian version in a new repetition.

Cole is a deep, long, and solid friend of the left, going back years, and way back when was one of the sources that made it possible to understand Iraq. And he is all of those things by virtue of being one of the best informed people on the region. To me he is not be scoffed at just because there’s a faction of euro-lefties that for some reason keep repeating Russian narratives on this.

It would take a lot to convince me otherwise. A lot more than what I have seen so far anyway.

And…we have to stay friends in spite of minor differences over one minor incident.

Or, if chemical weapons were used at all

Even the Russians don’t deny that much. UN people were able to examine some of the victims. The Russian version is that the chemical attack came from Assad forces bombing rebel chemical weapons which went off and the civilians were just collateral damage. The Russians even went so far as to name particular buildings that were involved. The Guardian had people on the ground who checked out the Russian story and called it bogus.

So again…remember, the Russians do not deny people were killed and injured by chemical weapons. It’s only the earlier deniers who were saying that.

…

I think it’s likely that chemical weapons were used, and that Assad is responsible. My point above is that this is the fog of war, and we can’t be certain about anything other than the fact of war itself.

Well I agree with the liklihood that Assad used them (and that he has before.)

However, this does not strike me as a fog of war situation. It’s more like a fog of propaganda situation.

It is actually not that hard for the surveillance systems involved to say what aircraft flew from where to where.

This is why the Russian denial is not as flat stupid as Assad’s. Assad, who of course is as much a pig as Hussein ever was, denies anything happened at all. The Russians in contrast acknowledge (1) that Assad’s aircraft were involved (because they know full well that american detection capacities extend to knowing at least THAT much), and (2) that there were injuries and deaths from chemical weapons (because the know full well that UN personnel had access to some of the injured) BUT their claim is that Assad attacked rebels who had chemical weapons and those went off…not that Assad’s guys dropped them. So the Russian story at least accounts for what they know would be known information. However, their version also names specific buildings that were targetted and as it happens Guardian reporters were on the ground there and checked that story out and it was bs.

The real issue, IMO, is whether a pointless and ineffectual grandstanding attack accomplishes anything or whether it’s just an escalation with us acting like we can do what we want when we want militarily. We probably agree on that, too.

Being in the fact-gathering stage maybe what we’re left with, when all is said and done. Again, I doubt the truth will come out for a long, long time.

I am not buying this. The truth is already out…some people are trying to obscure it. Not sure why anyone would want to contest that…nothing is gained either way by pretending the Syrian and Russian versions (which are actually different) make any sense.

(BTW I am also not buying the latest Trump administration escalation on this which claims the Russians knew in advance the attack was coming. The most reasonable take on this to me is that Assad just went back on his agreement from 2013 to not use chemical weapons again–an agreement that involved both the USA and Russia.)

What’s surprising in the 2010s, which is very different from the run-up to the Iraq war, is that some leftie blogger types are buying into the Russian and Syrian routines on this.

If you read closely about the 2013 chemical attack, the one that led to massive international pressure and even had Assad publicly declaring he would abandon chemical weapons programs, the military capacity to track Syrian communications and flights is very sophisticated. Which, again, is why the Russian cover story had to at least include the facts that there were Syrian planes involved AND that there was an actual chemical attack. (Assad’;s “denial” didn’t even do that much.)

To me this “it’s not clear” motif has about the same degree of minor annoyance as did having to debate serious people who bought into Russian trolling and were actually trying to claim that Hillary had a minor campaign person assassinated.

It’s a new factor in discussing issues.

It was far easier to pull up info back in the run-up to war in Iraq, when the left wasn’t divided by bad conspiracy theories.

Just a man’s opinion.

But I have shut down sources and took them off of bookmarks that show any hint of just parroting the Russian views on Syria. They do not help. They are part of the problem.

A lot here. Too much to post. Basically just a lot of details about Assad’s Syria and the complex civil war there.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/syria-war-crisis-refugees-assad-dictatorship-arab-spring-intervention-russia/

Syria chemical attack: Sarin gas likely weapon used in Idlib as experts say Russian claims ‘don’t add up’
Analysts say rebels lack money or expertise to stock deadly nerve agent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-chemical-attack-idlib-sarin-gas-toxic-khan-sheikhoun-russia-assad-claims-experts-evidence-a7668996.html

Experts have dismissed Russia’s claim that a rebel chemical weapons facility caused the death of more than 70 people in Syria as evidence indicating the government’s use of a banned nerve agent mounts.

Britain, the US and France are among the nations accusing Bashar al-Assad’s regime of gassing civilians in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, but Damascus claims it destroyed its toxic stockpiles following an international agreement struck in 2013.

The Russian defence ministry put out a competing version of events claiming that legitimate Syrian air strikes against “terrorists” had struck a warehouse used to produce and store shells containing toxic gas, which were allegedly being sent to Iraq.

“From 11.30am to 12.30pm local time, [9.30am to 10.30am BST] Syrian aircraft conducted an air strike in the eastern outskirts of Khan Sheikhoun on a large warehouse of ammunition of terrorists and the mass of military equipment,” said Major General Igor Konashenkov, according to a translation by Russian state media.

But witnesses and survivors said the bombs struck hours earlier, with images showing at least one hit a road rather than a building.

Hasan Haj Ali, commander of the Free Idlib Army rebel group, called the Russian statement blaming the rebels a “lie” and said rebels did not have the capability to produce nerve gas.

“Everyone saw the plane while it was bombing with gas,” he said.

“Likewise, all the civilians in the area know that there are no military positions there, or places for the manufacture of weapons.”

While Isis is known to have used mustard gas, the area around Khan Sheikhoun is controlled by a range of opposition factions including Islamists and groups linked to al-Qaeda.

Russia accused fighters of deploying chlorine gas in Aleppo but no evidence to support the allegations has been put forward by international agencies, who believe that sarin was deployed in Tuesday’s attack.

Beyza Unal, a research fellow with the International Security Department at Chatham House, said the banned nerve agent is expensive and difficult to purify and store.

“Something that needs a certain level of expertise and also money,” she told The Independent, saying any facility would need the ability to take oxygen out of the area where sarin is stored.

“I don’t think rebel groups would have the ability governments would have to purify nerve agents to a level that would make them stable,” Dr Unal added.

“I don’t buy the Russian claims…the story doesn’t add up.”

She added that images of bomb craters in Khan Sheikhoun indicated small payloads, rather than explosives of the type typically used to destroy an entire building.

Sarin can be fatal when either inhaled or absorbed through the skin, contaminating water and clothing to affect anyone coming into contact with symptoms including blurred vision, choking, nausea, weakness, convulsions, paralysis and respiratory failure.

Several volunteers who rushed to help victims of the initial bombing have themselves been taken ill, including Syrian Civil Defence members.

Hamid Kutini, a volunteer with the White Helmets, told The Independent he and several of his friends are unwell.

“I reached the area early after the attack and am still suffering now with weakness in my vision, a continuous headache, and I am not seeing colours well,” he said.

Mr Kutini said families were asleep when the bombs struck at around 6.30am local time (4.30am BST), with people calling the White Helmets reporting “strange symptoms” including drowsiness.

“We knew that some kind of poison gas was used,” he recalled. “The team found people fainting, and people with froth coming from the mouth, and shivers in their bodies…many died while they were asleep.”

Graphic footage showed rescuers dragging bodies and survivors out of buildings, removing their clothes and hosing them down with water in attempts to remove the toxin.

Doctors said victims started to choke, vomit and convulse with foam coming out of their mouths and pin-point pupils, showing symptoms of possible sarin gas exposure.

Amnesty International said many of at least 20 children killed appeared to have died in their beds, with the lack of visible wounds on their corpses pointing to a chemical attack.

A nurse working at the al-Rahma hospital, which was later bombed, told the charity he heard the bombs strike but with a dull “thump” that was unlike a normal “explosion sound”. Minutes later, the casualties started pouring in.

The youngest victims were the first to succumb to respiratory failure and paralysis, a doctor said, adding: “Children are the first ones to die, they cannot fight this. We only had one child who, thank God, survived.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the symptoms were consistent with “exposure to organophosphorus chemicals, a category of chemicals that includes nerve agents” that are banned as weapons of mass destruction.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) seconded the analysis, saying medical teams that treated affected patients in Bab al-Hawa found symptoms “consistent with exposure to a neurotoxic agent such as sarin gas”.

Doctors also detected the smell of bleach on some victims, “suggesting they had been exposed to chlorine” as one of at least two different chemical agents.

Hassan Elbahtimy, from the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College London, said all evidence available so far pointed to the use of sarin in Khan Shaikhoun.

“In this conflict, it is the regime that ultimately is more capable to mount chemical attacks,” he told The Independent, pointing to the previous sarin attack on Ghouta in 2013.

“They were supposed to have declared all their chemical weapons, including sarin stocks, which got destroyed under international supervision.

“If this turns out to be sarin and the regime is responsible, it means either they did not get rid of all their stocks or managed to reconstitute some of their production and handling capabilities.”

Dr Elbahtimy said Khan Sheikhoun was a “significant” target for Assad’s forces as it borders a motorway connecting government-held cities with rebel strongholds in the north.

The area saw intense fighting in 2016, with previous allegations of chlorine attacks levelled at the government.

Ammar Abdullah, a citizen journalist, told The Independent he had seen chlorine gas before but it was “nothing like this”, adding that friends from Damascus compared the symptoms to those seen in the Ghouta attack.

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ADDED BY EDIT APRIL 17: JUST ANOTHER ARTICLE ON THIS I HAD.

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Syria chemical weapons attack toll rises to 70 as Russian narrative is dismissed
Weapons expert says Russian claim that airstrike hit ‘terrorist warehouse’ in Idlib province is fanciful

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/syria-chemical-attack-idlib-province

At least 70 people have been killed in northern Syria after being exposed to a toxic gas that survivors said was dropped from warplanes, an attack that sparked comparisons to the most infamous act of the country’s six-year war.

At least another 100 people were being treated in hospitals in Idlib province where the strike took place at dawn on Tuesday. Several dozen others were transferred to Turkey, some in critical condition.

Condemnation mounted throughout Tuesday as the US, Britain and EU blamed the Syrian government for the carnage, hours before the start of a donor conference on Syria in Brussels.

Donald Trump denounced the carnage as a “heinous” act that “cannot be ignored by the civilised world”. But he also laid some of the responsibility on Barack Obama, saying in a statement that the attack was “a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution”.

Theresa May said she was appalled by reports of the attack and called for an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. “I’m very clear that there can be no future for Assad in a stable Syria which is representative of all the Syrian people and I call on all the third parties involved to ensure that we have a transition away from Assad. We cannot allow this suffering to continue,” she said.

UK-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the latest death toll in Khan Sheikhoun at 72 by Wednesday morning, including 20 children.

The Syrian military said it “categorically denied” responsibility. Russia, which has heavily backed the Syrian regime, said its planes were not operating near Idlib. Early on Wednesday, the Russian defence ministry claimed a Syrian airstrike had hit a “terrorist warehouse” containing an arsenal of “toxic substances” destined for fighters in Iraq. The ministry did not state if the attack was deliberate.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hamish de Bretton Gordon, director of Doctors Under Fire and former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment, said this claim was “completely untrue”.

“No I think this [claim] is pretty fanciful, no doubt the Russians trying to protect their allies,” he said. “Axiomatically, if you blow up sarin, you destroy it.”

“It’s very clear it’s a sarin attack,” he added. “The view that it’s an al-Qaida or rebel stockpile of sarin that’s been blown up in an explosion, I think is completely unsustainable and completely untrue.”

Hours after the attack, a hospital treating the injured was also hit. Images taken inside the clinic appeared to depict the blast as it happened. Photographs and videos taken at the scene and in evacuation areas nearby showed rows of small, lifeless children, some with foam visible near their mouths.

Save the Children said at least 11 children were among the casualties.

Jerry Smith, the operations chief of the UN-led team that supervised the removal of Syria’s sarin stockpiles following the gas attack on the rebel-held Ghouta area of Damascus four years ago, said: “This absolutely reeks of 2013 all over again.” In that attack, more than 1,300 people were killed. The UN said the perpetrators probably had access to the stockpile of sarin held by the Syrian military at the time, as well as the expertise to use it.

In the aftermath of the Ghouta massacre, a UN team supervised the surrender of Syria’s sarin supplies, the removal of which was supposed to have been completed early in 2014. However, suspicions have remained that a portion of the stockpile was not declared to inspectors.

Tuesday’s attack struck Khan Sheikhun, where there are thousands of refugees from the nearby province of Hama who have fled recent fighting. The town is also on a crossroads between Hama and Idlib and is considered vital to any regime offensive towards the northern city of Idlib.

“In this most recent attack, dozens of children suffocated to death while they slept,” said Ahmad Tarakji, the head of the Syrian American Medical Society (Sams), which supports hospitals in opposition-controlled areas in Syria. “This should strike at the very core of our humanity. How much longer will the world fail to respond to these heinous crimes?”

Sams said its doctors had determined that the symptoms of the patients were consistent with exposure to organic phosphorus compounds such as the nerve agent sarin, which is banned by the chemical weapons convention.

Smith said: “If you look at the footage itself, the victims don’t have any physical trauma injuries. There is foaming and pinpointed pupils, in particular. This appears to be some kind of organo-phosphate poison. In theory, a nerve agent. What is striking is that it would appear to be more than chlorine. The toxicity of chlorine does not lend itself to the sort of injuries and numbers that we have seen.”

Tuesday’s strike came days after the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said the Trump administration was no longer prioritising the removal of Assad, and that the Syrian people would ultimately decide his fate.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, made similar comments on Monday, affirming a shift in US policy that began under the Obama administration.

Critics of the stance have said that the absence of a credible threat has given the regime licence to commit war crimes with impunity as its backers, Iran and Russia, steadily claw back years of battlefield losses.

The UN security council said it would hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss the attack, after a request from Britain and France.

“Everyone is horrified and the children are in total shock,” said Mohammad Hassoun, a spokesman for civil defence rescue workers in the nearby town of Sarmin, which received 14 of the wounded from Tuesday’s attack. Hassoun said the victims were bleeding from the nose and mouth, had constricted irises and suffered from convulsions.

“The total number of wounded is incredible. So far it’s over 200,” said Mohammad, a doctor at another hospital in Idlib. “We received over 20 victims and most of them are children, and two of them in the ICU are extremely critical. There are a lot of injured.” Mohammad said the victims he had seen were drifting in and out of consciousness. Many were on respirators.

Few hospitals in Idlib have the capacity to deal with the symptoms of chemical attacks due to the repeated bombing of medical facilities by forces loyal to the government and lack sufficient oxygen tanks to treat victims.

Idlib is one of the last bastions of rebel control in Syria, and has been subjected to a relentless campaign of aerial bombardment despite a supposed ceasefire brokered this year by Russia and Turkey that was aimed at paving the way for political negotiations.

The raid in Khan Sheikhun indicates Assad’s growing confidence. He has wrested control of territory from the rebels, including the entire city of Aleppo, in recent months. His regime has benefited from the unflinching support of Moscow and Shia militias backed by Iran, as well as waning support for the opposition by its allies in the region and the new US administration.

The attack will refocus attention on the failure of the international community to prevent the worst abuses in Syria’s war, and casts doubt on a signature achievement of Obama’s government, which negotiated the presumed destruction of Assad’s chemical arsenal in 2013.

That deal followed the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, which nearly prompted a US intervention in the conflict. Since then, chemical attacks have continued on a smaller scale, mostly deploying chlorine gas, which was not covered by the deal because it has industrial uses.

However, a similar devastating attack to the Idlib strike took place in east Hama last December, with at least 93 people dying and several hundred more being wounded after exposure to what local authorities described as a nerve agent. Western intelligence agencies believe sarin was used in that attack, but were unable to retrieve biological samples that could prove their fears.

Smith said the recovery of samples would be pivotal to the investigation of the Idlib strike. “It is one of the most important things now to get biological samples, interviews and environmental samples, ideally from witnesses who can also give statements,” he said.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by zn.