Two people - including a thirteen year old girl - died and one hundred twenty were sickened when the rebels in Aleppo were hit with a chlorine gas attack.
Chlorine was the first gas used during the first World War. That it is largely ineffective led to the development of such treats as Mustard Gas and Lewisite.
Doctors in Aleppo Tend to Scores of Victims in Gas Attack:
Rescuers and citizen journalists who went to the scene said by text message that there had been a strong smell of bleach.
One of the victims, a 13-year-old girl named Hajer Kyali, died Wednesday afternoon. She had been in intensive care since the attack, which doctors said they believed had struck her family's house directly, delivering a deadly dose of the gas.
Medical staff members described seeing people with symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughing, sneezing, irritation of the eyes, nausea and in some cases respiratory failure. Such symptoms are consistent with attacks involving chlorine, which can kill in high concentrations.
Syria promised to give up its war gas a while back but in my understanding has surrendered only a tiny portion of its stockpile.
However, chlorine gas is quite easy to make. Possibly it was used because the aggressors had no access to the more-effective gasses such as Mustard Gas and Sarin.
Additional Reporting:
[This is by no means the first such attack. See here for Wikipedia info.]
[According to Wikipedia, earlier attacks did include Sarin. Chlorine is readily available from industrial sources]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:23PM
Hard to do considering Al Nusra has been occupying the chemical plant that makes chlorine gas for the past year or so and Assad has given up all his chemical weapons. But carry on, propaganda machine. Has Assad been spotted eating babies yet?
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday September 09 2016, @05:33PM
Chlorine gas is really easy to make, so easy that people do it accidentally and end up dying from it enough that they put warning on bleach and ammonia bottles telling you not to mix them. You don't need a giant factory to make some, just household cleaners that are common as dirt. I suspect you could probably also find people making Drano (or what ever the Syrian equivalent product is) bombs over there too. It isn't like making those things is hard and the materials difficult to find.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:50PM
So if it's so easy to make, just about anyone could make it. Why blame the "government"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @06:09PM
Who else has got the helicopters to drop the weapons? ISIS haven't. The Kurds haven't. So, it's Syria, Russia or the US?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday September 09 2016, @07:23PM
You don't need helicopters to drop the weapons. Quite simple to be done via rockets, the warheads which can be produced to fit on the rockets is in the factory held by Al-Nusra.
Plus I am sure there are alternative delivery methods available. Humans are the best at finding ever more ways of being brutal to other humans, so where there is a will, there is a way.
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday September 09 2016, @07:53PM
Well, how do they know it fell from a helicopter and not a neighboring rooftop?
Only one barrel is telling me this was clandestine. Pretty sure a helicopter can hold more than one barrel. If a military was going to gas bomb a city I’d think there would be a heli dropping 4 barrels every 5 minutes or so. A large steam of them dropping barrel after barrel. If I was the military and considering atrocities, I wouldn’t even gas bomb them. I’d be dropping barrels of flaming oil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 10 2016, @10:34AM
The last widely reported "gas attack" occurred when the "rebels" were getting beaten. Why would the Syrian government drop chlorine gas on civilians at a time when they have the upper hand?
Let's see what Occam's Razor can slice out...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday September 11 2016, @02:03AM
He agreed to yes but only handed over a token quantity of actual gas.
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