‘Death was everywhere’: Syria’s chemical weapons victims share their trauma | Syrian War News

Eastern Ghouta, Syria – Amina Habya was still awake when she heard shouting outside her window in Zamalka, Ghouta, on the night of August 21, 2013.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime had just fired rockets filled with sarin gas at Zamalka, and people were shouting: “Chemical attack! Chemical weapons attack!”

He quickly dipped a towel in the water and placed it on his nose as he ran to the fifth – and highest – floor of his building with his daughters and sons-in-law.

Because chemicals are generally heavier than air, Habya knew that the higher levels of buildings might become less polluted.

They were safe, but Habya later discovered that her husband and son, who were not at home, and her daughter-in-law and her two children, who were asleep, had all been suffocated.

“Death was everywhere,” said Habya, 60, sitting on a plastic chair outside her house wearing a black abaya, a black hijab and a black shawl over her face.

Habya still lives in Zamalka in a one-story apartment with his married daughters, and grandchildren and sons-in-law. Their building is one of the few in the area.

Some were targeted by state strikes during the war.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, he held up a picture of eight children wrapped in black blankets, the bodies picked up after the sarin gas attack, suffocated to death.

Two of them were his grandchildren.

“This is my grandson and this is my grandson,” he told Al Jazeera, pointing to the two dead children in the photo.

About 1,127 people died in the attack, and another 6,000 suffered from severe respiratory symptoms, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

“[Rescuers] he found five people dead in the bathroom. Others [corpses] they were found on the stairs and some on the ground. Others [died] they are still asleep,” said Habya.

The legacy of chemical warfare

On December 8, al-Assad fled to Russia with his family before the opposition reached the capital.

For 13 years, he and his family fought a devastating war against their people, rather than give power to his rebellion that began in March 2011.

Al-Assad’s regime has launched systematic airstrikes on civilians, starving communities, and tortured and killed tens of thousands of real and perceived opponents.

But the regime’s use of chemical weapons – prohibited by international laws and treaties – was one of the worst aspects of the conflict.

According to a 2019 report by the Global Policy Institute, the Syrian regime carried out 98 percent of the 336 chemical weapons attacks during the war, with the rest attributed to ISIL (ISIS).

The confirmed attacks took place over a six-year period between 2012 and 2018 and often targeted rebel-held areas as part of a broader policy of collective punishment, the report said.

Towns and districts in the suburbs of Damascus were hit repeatedly, as were towns in districts such as Homs, Idlib and Rif Dimashq.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that 1,514 people were killed in the attack, including 214 children and 262 women.

In Eastern Ghouta, victims told Al Jazeera that they still cannot shake the sad memory, as they are filled with joy and relief that al-Assad is finally gone.

Joy and despair

Before the war, Habya says, he neither hated nor liked al-Assad, but became alarmed as the regime began to brutally crack down on protesters – and civilians who did not participate.

In early 2013, the police arrested and imprisoned his son while he was praying in his shop. Months later, they killed his son’s family in a chemical weapons attack.

Habya never saw his son again and only recently learned that he died in the notorious Sednaya prison in 2016.

Habya believes that the regime particularly oppressed and persecuted the residents of Ghouta because it sits at the entrance to Damascus and the rebels had taken it.

“We are very afraid,” Habya told Al Jazeera. “The name ‘Bashar al-Assad’ can strike fear into all of us.”

As the al-Assad regime committed a growing list of atrocities, the then US President Barack Obama told reporters in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line” and – if crossed – would force him to use the military in Syria.

After the sarin gas attack in August 2013, Obama was pressured to follow through on his warning, which risked angering his constituents who believed that the United States should not interfere in foreign conflicts.

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted between August 29 and September 1 of that year, only 29 percent of Obama’s base of Democrats believe that the US should strike Syria, while 48 percent are completely against it. Others were unsure.

In the end, Obama called off the strikes and accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to allow the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – a United Nations body – to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.

Although the OPCW was able to dispose of most of the chemical weapons the Syrian government said it possessed when its first mission ended on September 30, 2014, the UN agency said the government may have hidden more.

After the regime repeatedly used chemical weapons in the war, the OPCW decided to suspend Syria from the Chemical Weapons Convention in April 2021 for failing to comply with its obligations.

He is hungry for justice

The lack of results against the regime angered Syrians, as many victims of the 2013 attacks still yearn for justice.

Habya’s daughter Eman Suleiman, 33, stuck her head out the side of the door and told Al Jazeera that she wanted the international community to help al-Assad be held accountable for his atrocities, suggesting that the International Criminal Court (ICC) could indict him.

However, Syria is not currently a member of the Rome Statute, the treaty that gives the court jurisdiction. The only way the ICC can open a case in Syria is if the new authorities sign and ratify the law, or if the UN Security Council passes a resolution allowing the court to investigate atrocities in Syria.

Al-Assad and his close aides could be charged with a long list of abuses, including the use of chemical weapons, which could amount to crimes against humanity, according to Human Rights Watch.

In November 2023, French judges approved an arrest warrant for al-Assad, accusing him of ordering the use of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta.

The warrant was granted under the “universal” legal concept, which allows any country to try war criminals accused of serious crimes committed anywhere in the world.

“We want to see [al-Assad] in the trial, he was convicted and he pleaded guilty,” Suleiman told Al Jazeera.

“We just want our rights. Nothing less and nothing more. In any country in the world, if someone kills another person, they will answer,” he said.

But even if some form of justice is achieved, no verdict or prison sentence will bring back the dead, Habya said.

“God will punish every single oppressor,” he lamented.

Speaking outside

Five years after the first chemical weapons attack, the al-Assad regime carried out another in Eastern Ghouta on April 7, 2018.

In this case, chlorine gas was used, killing about 43 people and injuring a number, according to the OPCW report.

Both al-Assad and his key ally Russia say Syrian rebel groups and militias are planning the attack.

They are said to have threatened and silenced the victims after capturing eastern Ghouta days later.

Tawfiq Diam, 45, said government officials “visited” his home a week after his wife and four children – Joudy, Mohamed, Ali and Qamr, aged eight to 12 – were killed in a chlorine attack.

“They told us that they did not use chemical weapons, but that terrorists and armed groups used them,” recalled Diam, angry.

Diam added that government officials brought in a Russian network reporter who asked for an interview about the chemical weapons attack.

He said he told the reporter and security officials that they wanted to feel pressured.

Now, he says, he can finally speak freely about the attack after being in fear of the regime for so long.

Habya agrees, saying that the fear he carried in his heart under al-Assad’s regime disappeared when he fled.

He remembers being full of joy when he asked a bunch of young men outside his home why they were happy and celebrating on December 8.

“They said to me: ‘Donkey, Bashari, he has gone.