sábado, 24 de agosto de 2013

Syrian victims of alleged gas attack smuggled to Jordan for blood tests - The Guardian

At least three victims of the alleged chemical weapons attack in east Damascus on Thursday have been smuggled to Jordan where samples of their blood and urine will help determine which agent was used to gas hundreds of people.

The samples could help inform an international response to the attack, which has sharply upped the stakes in Syria's civil war, drawing demands for recrimination and edging a much-feared regional spillover closer to reality.

Two mosques in Lebanon's second city, whose sheikhs have been persistently critical of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's regime, were severely damaged by car bombs on Friday . At least 42 worshippers were killed and up to 500 were wounded in the deadliest act of terror to hit the volatile country since the war started across its border two and a half years ago.

The bombs exploded as midday prayers were concluding on the first day of the Islamic weekend. Both mosques were filled with people who, minutes later, would have spilled out into car parks where the explosives-filled vehicles were parked.

"It is already hell on earth here," said Mohammed Dahbi, a mechanic from Tripoli, a Sunni Muslim-dominated city in north Lebanon. "But it could have been worse. So much worse."

A similar attack in Dahiyeh, in the Shia heartland of south Beirut, on 15 August killed 27 people.

Dahiyeh is a hub of operations for the Hezbollah militia. The Syrian war has deepened divisions between the two Islamic sects, which line up on different sides; the Sunnis largely support the opposition in Syria but Hezbollah is resolutely backing the Assad regime.

Hezbollah condemned the Tripoli attack, which it said was aimed at causing "civil strife". However, the condemnation fell on deaf ears near the scene of the blasts, with bystanders angrily blaming the group for the destruction.

"When there's a bomb in their area, they blame 'Takfiris', by whom they mean us," said Ahmed Otthman, referring to a term used to describe radical Islamists. "And when things like this happen to us, they blame Israel."

Tripoli has been the scene of repeated clashes over the past two years between its majority Sunnis and a minority community of Alawites who have remained barricaded on a hilltop suburb near the centre of the city.

The two ruling Syrian families, the Assads and the Makhloufs, are Alawites, and much of the Damascus establishment hails from the sect, which is loosely aligned to Shia Islam and comprises 12% of Syria's population.

Speakers at Friday prayers at each of the mosques had been denouncing the poison gas attack in Syria's Ghouta region, which came as the Syrian military launched a major advance into eastern areas of the capital that it continued to shell on Friday.

United Nations inspectors in Damascus were denied access for a second day to the affected areas of the capital – only seven-10 miles from their hotel.

Sources inside rebel-held districts said an active network of defectors, some of whom had fled the Syrian military's chemical warfare division, were helping to smuggle biological samples from the scenes of the attack to Jordan. At least three more victims suffering mild effects of gassing will be transferred to Jordan in the next few days.

The samples being sourced are biopsies of livers and spleens from fatalities, as well as blood and urine from survivors.

Rebel groups have received contact from investigators identifying themselves as UN team members asking for co-operation in providing samples. The investigators have apparently asked for biological samples to be taken from animals, too. The Guardian has been unable to verify if the contact was from the UN.

A questionnaire distributed to some rebel commanders asks for GPS co-ordinates of the attacks and launch sites as well as all medical records of victims, laboratory results and environmental samples.

Chemical weapons experts interviewed by the Guardian said that symptoms of the dead and dying depicted on videos posted online support a growing view that sarin was the nerve agent used in the attack, which killed up to 1,400 people.

Britain has blamed the Assad regime for the attack, the worst of its kind anywhere since Saddam Hussein's army gassed Kurds in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja in 1988, killing between 3,000-5,000 people.

However, the US continued to toe a cautious line, asking its intelligence community to gather more information before deciding what to do about it.

Eastern Ghouta has been a stronghold of rebel groups for much of the past year. Persistent bombing by Syrian military jets and artillery has been unable to dislodge armed opposition groups who have been poised on the edge of the capital's inner sanctum, but unable to advance.

The Syrian news agency, Sana, said the operation carried out in the early hours of Thursday was the largest launched since the civil war began. It said it aimed to clear the east of the capital and then pave the way for a push towards the Jordanian border, which remains bitterly contested by both sides.

The Syrian regime has been advancing in parts of the country, with the help of forces from Hezbollah, particularly in Homs and the west. However, it has been unable to clear the capital of rebel groups, which continue to pose a potent threat to its institutions.

No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario