Contaminated, Dead

"I put the mask on my mouth. My father was holding someone up but then he fell down himself. I said to him, 'What's wrong with you?' I picked up a pail of water and shoved my nose into it. I threw water over my family. I threw water over my younger sister and I put her into the ambulance.
"I stayed there running around, calling for help. My uncle came, and then he fainted, too. I went outside calling for the ambulance again but nobody heard me. I went back inside, and there were my family again, all of them. I threw water on them but this time nobody woke up."
Young unnamed boy in Damascus suburb.

Harrowing: A mother and father weep over their child's body who was killed in a suspected chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta

Other children have testified about what they experienced on Wednesday in several suburbs of Damascus where the rebel opposition have held their positions over the past year. One of which suburb the Baathist Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad is particularly anxious to reclaim as it represents a vital supply route now cut off to him. The entire country is in turmoil, completely dysfunctional.

Diplomatic measures, refused outright by both the Shia regime and its Sunni opposition have been recommended, suggested, threatened to be imposed, and the big power of the United States has been invoked famously to warn President Assad that should he decide to use any of his immense stockpile of chemical weapons, the tolerance of the United States and its allies would immediately crumble and swift intervention would result.

Through satellite imagery it was possible to make note that activities were undertaken at many of the nerve-gas depots which appeared to lead to the expectation that the regime was busy safeguarding them lest they fall into the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists whose malign presence President al-Assad has for the past two years warned the international community about. Tacit approval of a presumed move to consolidate the depots to be more easily guarded ensued.

But like Iran, a country skilled in circumlocution, easy promises it has no intention of keeping, intent on gaining time to enable it to finalize and speed up its plans on achieving nuclear weapons, Bashar al-Assad has been an able pupil of the crocodile smile and the perfidious intention. While Iran closes in on its perfection of weapons-delivery systems and uranium enrichment, Syria closes in on its goal to destroy the rebel bases, with the estimable assistance of those collegial Hezbollah warriors.

A street that was hit by a gas attack in the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma is completely deserted after yesterday's attack

The United Nations has issued grave new figures relating to a 'lost generation' of Syrians. Children under the age of 12 now number a base figure of one million refugees forced to flee from their homes and find desperate haven elsewhere. These are Syrian civilians, men, women and the elderly, and the children among them, one million children under twelve. Homeless, facing privation and starvation. The countries to which they have fled, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon are struggling with the assistance of the United Nations, to cope with the influx.

Those that remained behind, secure they might think, in the capital of their own country, have experienced direct artillery fire from the centre of Damascus, from the military. Regime spokespeople scoff at the very idea they would conduct such a low and disreputably gruesome attack on the innocent. And Iran helpfully elaborates that this is a plan by the rebels, to conduct those dreadful chemical attacks on their own, and in the process to implicate Syrian troops, in an effort to spur the international community to action.

The 20-team United Nations weapons inspectors who arrived in Damascus on Thursday have been set up in a luxury hotel, awaiting government permission to inspect previously-agreed-upon sites where chemical weapons have been used in months past. Permission to come to Syria, to see those very particular sites and none other took months of negotiation. What chance the regime will magnanimously usher the inspectors twenty minutes' drive away where the latest chemical attacks took place the day before?

Ten missiles at least were said to have hit the suburbs of East Ghouta and Zamalka, chemical-laden as only the regime has the skills to do. Witnesses spoke of seeing those missiles, some of which were caught incoming on camera, from central Damascus. Experts stress that this scale of weaponization requires an expert facility beyond the experience of the rebel forces. And they are agreed the videos they have viewed give ample evidence of nerve gas.

They speak too of the unlikelihood of so many children being successfully rehearsed to give witness to the unspeakable carnage.