Baladi - Coverage
On April 7, a chemical attack was launched on the city of Douma in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta, killing dozens of civilians, most of whom were women and children.
After the attack, opposition factions in Douma surrendered and agreed to evacuate the city. Tens of thousands of people were boarded on buses to be exiled to refugees camp in the north of Syria.
NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock and Beirut producer Lama Al-Arian have gained rare access to northern Syria to hear the stories of people from Douma who survived the chemical attack.
When asked how exactly they met the people who had escaped from Douma, Sherlock answered:
"We met them in refugee camps that are run by Turkey, in northern Aleppo province in Syria. They had just arrived on buses after surviving years of siege and bombardment in Douma, and now they're exiled from their homes. Everyone was just thin and shellshocked. And when we arrived, there was this huge thunderstorm and people were waiting in the rain to take supplies - food, water, diapers - back to their tent. They were walking in sandals through the mud."
Sherlock heard many stories of the people there, and wanted to share the story of Seena who witnessed the chemical attack with her children.
"She's 19 years old, and she's sitting in a tent with three other women and lots of small children. They haven't even had a chance to unpack yet, and already there's heavy rain seeping into the tent. We start to talk about the night of the apparent chemical attack, and she says on that night, there was also very heavy conventional bombing, airstrikes. And then these barrels hit that had a strange smell. There's thunder outside as she talks."
"I called them. They smelled it," Seena said, "My children started to turn blue so we tried to go upstairs to get some air, and then the bombs were shelling us. So we had to go back downstairs, and we had to take some vinegar and rub it in our noses."
When asked what exactly smelled, Seena said they smelled as if it was a barrel of chlorine just spilled everywhere.
Most people were hiding in a basement because of the heavy airstrikes, Sherlock added, but some kids had gone upstairs, and they were the first that alerted her to the attack, according to Seena's testimony. Seena says that they started yelling, chlorine, chlorine.
Sherlock asked her, how did children recognize a chemical attack? She said, these are the children of war. They've experienced this. They know.
Sherlock then noted that there was a pattern among the people there,
"Several people said they were witnesses to the attack. Some of them were still sick. We met Amani, a woman in a medical clinic whose lungs are very damaged. Her condition has worsened since that night, and now she has to go to hospital. And there was a man in a tent who's so ill that he couldn't sit up and was using an inhaler to help him breathe as he spoke to us. Most of the people describe the chemical attack as being chlorine gas."
Amani, the woman whose lungs were damaged, when asked by Sherlock about the Russian claims that the chemical attack was just a hoax, she started sobbing. She said: "It happened; I saw it with my own eyes. What's not clear exactly is the death toll."
Reporting Ruth Sherlock for NPR Broadcaster.