Signs of a Massacre in Syria

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

23 August 13

he images are gut-wrenching. In one video, a man tries to revive a child, a boy perhaps three or four years old, by pouring water over his face, rubbing him, attempting a futile resuscitation. The boy is pale and limp and appears to have died. Around him there are more bodies in similar states of death or near-death, prostrate on a floor. Men move around with the kinetic energy of those overwhelmed by a catastrophe and lacking the knowledge and the tools to save the victims. Oddly, there is no blood. It is as if everyone has drowned.

This was only one of the jerky videos to emerge from the horrifying tragedy that appears to have occurred on Wednesday morning in Ghouta, an area near Damascus that has been dominated by the rebels fighting the Assad régime in Syria. In a civil war that has now claimed over a hundred thousand lives - and in which there have been many atrocities, including several previous large-scale massacres - what happened in the Ghouta region appears to surpass anything that has come before. The body count of what is being described by rebels as a chemical-weapons attack by the régime - that allegation is as yet unverified - has been said to range as high as thirteen hundred. The nerve gas sarin is said to cause some of the symptoms seen in the video, though there are also reasons to suspect that some other agent was responsible.

On Wednesday morning, when the first reports of the attack emerged, there was talk of dozens of victims, and then hundreds. And then, coinciding with the videos being posted online, the estimated numbers began to soar. One of the first tweets I saw about the news said that Syria now had its "Halabja" - a reference to the chemical-weapons attack on the insurgent Kurdish town of Halabja by Saddam Hussein's military in 1988, which killed as many as five thousand civilians. At the time, Saddam was a tacit ally of the West, fighting a gruesomely bloody conflict against neighboring Iran, in an earlier version of the lethal Sunni-Shiite split which has now made Syria its central battleground. Saddam initially denied responsibility for Halabja, although it later emerged that his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - or, as his enemies knew him, "Chemical Ali" - had carried it out, just as he had many other chemical attacks in the war from 1980 to 1988, in which as many as a million Iranians and Iraqis died. The reaction of the Reagan Administration, which had been providing Saddam's military with information of the Iranian troop concentrations from AWACS surveillance in order to assist his missile-targeting against them, was initially to side with Saddam by suggesting that Iran had also used chemical weapons in the fighting. It was a shameful attempt at disinformation. Before long, when the facts of the attack became obvious, the U.S. position was amended.

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