‘Their bodies had turned to black’: Syrian chlorine victims can finally speak out | Syria

For years, residents of Ghouta, an embattled opposition-held region on the outskirts of Damascus, grew used to death loudly announcing its presence. When Syrian and Russian jets or helicopter gunships roared overhead, bombs were never far behind. But the night of 7 April 2018 was different.

According to an extensive investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), two yellow cylinders were dropped from a Syrian air force helicopter, crashing through the top floor of one apartment building and landing on a balcony of another, in the eastern Ghouta town of Douma. The noise they made was negligible compared with the explosions of barrel bombs and airstrikes. But the concentrated green-yellow chlorine gas that hissed out of the canisters was no less deadly.

In air raids during the five-year-long siege of the town, the people of Douma usually sought shelter in basements. Chlorine is not as dangerous as sarin – a nerve agent that deposed president Bashar al-Assad deployed against civilians on several occasions in the 13-year civil war. But because chlorine is heavier than air, it sank down through the storeys and street-level gratings into two basements. At least 43 people choked to death, their blistered bodies blue and black when civil defence workers bought the corpses out to the street.

Hamad Shukri, now 16, was 10 when the attack happened one street over from his home. In photographs taken at the time, he can be seen cradling his distressed baby brother, holding an oxygen mask to the infant’s face in a makeshift hospital that treated about 100 survivors still struggling to breathe.

“I remember it very well because there was no explosion, only gas. The adults were throwing water on everyone to try and wash the chemical off,” he said. “I didn’t understand what was happening. I just knew that people were dead.”

The last rebel group fighting in Douma surrendered to the regime the next day. For six years, afraid of reprisals, the town had grieved in silence for loved ones lost to chemical attacks and countless others killed by conventional weapons. But after an astonishing and rapid offensive by rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), more than 50 years of Assad family rule collapsed last week, when the dictator fled to Russia rather than mount a final defence of the capital, Damascus.

After decades of repression in one of the most oppressive police states in the world, Syrians are finally free to tell their stories, and Assad’s repeated use of chemical warfare against his own people can no longer be ignored, covered up or denied.

Tawfiq Diab, 79, lost his wife, Hanan, and his four children, aged between eight and 12 – Mohammed, Ali, Qamar and Joudy – in the chlorine attack, and barely survived himself. He did not know that his family – along with his brother and sister-in-law and their seven children, an uncle, and 30 neighbours – had been killed until he regained consciousness in hospital 10 days later. To this day, he is still not even sure where their bodies were taken by regime forces.

“After I was awake I started asking questions but police came and told me ‘don’t ask about them’,” he said. “I was arrested and spent a week at the police station. They told me ‘we will cut off your tongue’ if you speak.

“We were silenced against our will … Now we can talk.”

Abdulhadi Sariel, 64, lived on the opposite side of the street from where the chlorine cylinders landed, and said his family had survived because they stayed on a higher floor. One of his daughters still has respiratory problems as a result of the attack, he said.

“No one in that basement came out alive. Their bodies turned to black, their clothes went green and were burnt, they crumbled and stuck to their bodies. The clothes looked like wood,” he said. “We threw out all of our clothes but [you can still see the effect] on the curtains.

“We can escape the bullets and the tanks, but chemicals travel through the air. We were afraid, children were afraid.”

When the Syrian government allowed OPCW investigators to visit Douma a few weeks later, Diab, Sariel and many other survivors said they had been warned to tell the visitors that people had died from inhaling smoke and dust, not chemicals. “The commanders said ‘if you say a word other than what we tell you, we will kill you’. But I always kept the curtains [as evidence] for this moment, when the truth would come out,” Sariel said.

Syria spiralled into a devastating war after the regime cracked down on peaceful pro-democracy Arab spring protests, spawning the worst refugee crisis since the second world war and the rise of Islamic State. At least 300,000 people have been killed and 100,000 have gone missing since 2011 – most thought to have disappeared into the regime’s notorious prison system.

Since Assad’s downfall, fighting has continued between Turkish-backed Arab rebels and US-backed Kurdish-led forces across Syria’s north, and Israel has launched a huge bombing campaign aimed at destroying the regime’s conventional and chemical weapons stocks.

Assad agreed to destroy his chemical arsenal in 2013 after international outrage over a sarin attack on another neighbourhood of Ghouta that killed hundreds of people. However, chlorine was used to attack rebel-held areas dozens of times afterwards, and sarin several times, in attacks likely to have been carried out by the regime, according to Human Rights Watch.

The Syrian government denied ever using chemical weapons, claiming that the attacks had never happened or that rebel groups had staged them. Russian-driven disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories have insulted victims and obstructed the pursuit of justice, with Moscow repeatedly using its veto as a permanent member of the UN security council to delay or block investigations or set up a special international criminal court tribunal for Syria.

Chemical weapons were just one of the horrors Assad unleashed on his own people. Much of Ghouta was reduced to rubble by airstrikes and barrel bombs, and after enduring years of siege, most civilians fled to the rebel-held north west as their neighbourhoods fell one by one. Today, viewed from the highway, the scale of the destruction is akin to that caused by Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip; abandoned concrete husks, home to nothing but dust and ghosts.

In recent years, the international community had quietly accepted that Syria’s war was all but over: about 3 million people who fled the regime were trapped in a pocket of the north west of the country, but the frontlines had grown cold since a ceasefire in 2020.

Assad was slowly being rehabilitated: last year, Syria was welcomed back to the Arab League, and several western countries, keen to send refugees home, made moves to restore diplomatic relations. The US, which had long held a firm line on sanctions and Assad’s political isolation, also concluded that it would no longer “stand in the way” of reconciliation efforts.

Many Syrians had despaired of the regime ever being held accountable for its crimes. Formidable challenges lie ahead in the wake of Assad’s departure, but dreams of justice, freedom and a fairer society are no longer just fantasy.

In Douma on Friday afternoon, chairs had been put out on the unpaved street, a sound system was blasting Egyptian pop music, and traditional wedding dancers were getting ready for the evening’s celebrations. “We continued our lives, we kept going, day by day,” said Diab, who lost his family in the 2018 chlorine attack. “Now liberation has arrived.”