No Comment, No Condemnation
Overnight the Syrian government dropped chemical weapons on its own people, killing dozens, including at least ten children, according to the latest updates. As many as 100 might be dead. The New York Times calls it the “deadliest chemical weapons attack in years in Syria.”
A doctor treating the patients described what happened to CNN:
“Today around 7:30 a.m., about 125 injuries arrived to our hospital. Twenty-five of them were already dead, 70 to 80% of the wounded people were kids and women,” he said. “The symptoms were pale skin, sweating, narrow or pin-eye pupils, very intense respiratory detachments. Those symptoms match the usage of sarin,” a deadly chemical nerve agent that is considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).
That was just the beginning.
“A few hours later, according to several witnesses, another airstrike hit one of the clinics treating victims, who had been farmed out to smaller hospitals and maternity wards because the area’s largest hospital had been severely damaged by an airstrike two days earlier,” the Times adds.
The Washington Post describes the scene in Syria, reporting that “images from the area showed the bodies of at least a dozen men, women and children splayed across the ground between two houses. Video footage showed lifeless bodies wrapped in blankets and packed on the back of a truck. The youngest children were wearing diapers.
At a photo-op with Jordan’s King Abdullah Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was asked by multiple reporters to comment of the attack by the Syrian government on its own people. He looked in the cameras, shook hands with Abdullah, smiled briefly, then walked away.
No comment, no condemnation.
The attack has been called a war crime.
The Daily Beast notes that just last week, “in Ankara, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled that the U.S. had no quarrel with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a man Tillerson’s predecessor compared to Adolf Hitler after he slaughtered more than 1,000 people with poison gas in 2013.”
The “longer-term status of President Assad,†Tillerson said, “will be decided by the Syrian people,†a euphemism used by Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran to indicate that he isn’t going anywhere.
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