Talk:Alleged Chemical Attack, April 13, 2013

Location
Sheikh Maqsoud is a large district, per the boundaries on Wikimapia and density of buildings within, it must be one of the more populous districts. It has a majority Jurdish population, and didn'tfall to the rebels until shortly before this incident. It's been the site of looting, kidnapping, torture and executions by rebel brigades even the SOHR reported, the public beheading of a prominent pro-government Imam, and more. More detail/links etc. later. --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Foaming at the Mouth?
Still no discussion? Well, here's a good starter. I heard this Israeli talk of foaming at the mouth (see NYT article for example), and was a bit confused until I learned the missing link, making this alleged sarin attack this same one in Sheikh Maqsoud (although Khan al-Assal still has no better guess than "super-strength tear gas"). --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Daily Mail April 24:
 * Experts believe that chemical weapons may have been dropped on Kurdish residents of Aleppo's Sheikh Massoud [sic] region during an attack which saw two babies and a woman killed earlier this month. ... It is thought that the April 13 assault may have been in revenge for residents' decision to defect to support the rebels.

(Wonder if all the foreign fighters and weapons influenced their decision to hand the place over to rebels?) --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC) 15 people were injured, they report, and rebel sources provided names for the dead, still only three. Four-month-old Yehia, 18-month-old Abu Bakr Younis and adult Ghadeer Neddaf. There's a video you can see there (see below for analysis) "posted on the Facebook page of British-trained doctor Niazi Habash, who treated some of the Aleppo victims."
 * He said that they displayed symptoms of chemical exposure including foaming at the mouth, constricted pupils and difficulty breathing. They were treated using chemical weapons antidote Atropine, Dr Habash claims.
 * Experts claim that their injuries appear to be similar to those suffered by victims of an attack on Khan al-Assad [sic], near Aleppo.
 * ''The most likely chemical to have been used is sarin according to former British Army specialist and director Hamish de Bretton-Gordon.
 * He told the Telegraph: From what we've seen and the descriptions of the containers being dropped from the air, it certainly seems that the regime is using sarin in an unprepared state in these attacks. But, as in the Tokyo subway bombings, sarin does not need to be weaponised and placed in missiles to kill. 'It is still lethal when people are exposed to it.'

Unprepared sarin, because it was in canisters, and the people in the video look so much like sarin victims? Hmmm.... --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The Guardian, April 26:
 * Some of the videos in circulation online show alleged victims foaming at the mouth, but that is not listed as a sarin symptom on the website of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

(I saw drooling and runny nose cited for low-level exposure clues, so high-level, who knows...) --Caustic Logic (talk) 11:41, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Richard Guthrie, a British chemical weapons expert and former head of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said: "That [foaming at the mouth] would not be indicative of use of nerve agents but is more likely to be a sign of a choking agent such as phosgene being used, if anything were used. Phosgene is a widely used industrial chemical as well as being a first world war-era chemical weapon."

(or choking agent like swallowed milk combined with a funny joke?) --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Jean-Pascal Zanders, an expert at the EU Institute for Strategic Studies, said: "It's not possible that what is being shown to the public is a chemical weapons attack. The video from Aleppo showing foaming at the mouth does not look like a nerve agent. I'm wholly unconvinced."’

Kudos to Eliot Higgins/Brown Moses for doing some follow-up on the CW allegations, speaking to a few experts in this article, who offer thoughts of varying credibility. Specifically on the foaming-mouths video claim, when asked "This video shows victims from the Sheikh Maghsoud attack. In your opinion would you be able to draw any solid conclusions about the chemical agent used from the information in that video alone?" they said this: Paul from Allen Vanguard:
 * None of the people in the hospital are wearing IPE (individual protective equipment); they are not being affected by the same condition as the patient on the stretcher. The first ‘victim’ is not in pain and does not have any visible symptoms beyond a non-moving fresh thin, white trail of foam leading down his face from each nostril.  This is not a recognised symptom of nerve agent attack and the early signs (pinpointing of pupils, running nose, tight chest & difficulty of breathing) are absent. ... The presence of a camera person, lack of IPE worn by the staff, lack of general panic and lack of recognised symptoms amongst the ‘victims’ makes me think that the event has been staged.  The symptoms that have been presented have probably been elaborated with single applications of foam; the foam has stopped emerging by the time the camera is shown at them.

He says the one woman looks less fake: "She appears to have red blotches on her face and has breathing apparatus in her mouth.  She is not moving.  I don’t think that this is a nerve agent.  However, red blotches and shortness of breath (patient requiring artificial respiration) is a symptom of a blood agent, such as hydrogen cyanide."

Steve Johnson, Deputy Editor of CBRNe World:
 * I can see ER room chaos and an extremely unusual foaming at the mouth. Doubly unusual as the person, despite being able to move makes no attempt to remove it.  No solid conclusions one way or the other could be made from this video. Although it does raise a suspicion of faking symptoms with the highly uniform, highly white foam.

The other expert is Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, widely-cited blamer of the Assad regime (see above):
 * Not really, there are some inconsistent symptoms with nerve Agent poisoning in this attack. There is however some evidence to suggest that this attack is where the samples that the UK and US  Govts and others, analysis comes from, which reported microscope traces of Sarin.
 * In other words, govt's say one thing, this supposed evidence says another, and he doesn't know which way to go. Not the best turn compared to the other two. --Caustic Logic (talk) 07:25, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Miri Wood, writing a scathing and half-decent analysis at SyriaNews perhaps put it best:
 * Yellow urinalist Amanpour shows video of people with cans of shaving cream on their faces, while lying on litters, as uncorroborated, corroborating, evidence. --Caustic Logic (talk) 07:25, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Samples?

 * Sharmine Narwani, Al-Akhbar
 * The Times article then gets even stranger. To quote:
 * “In the chaos of Syria’s civil war, no hospital in the rebel-held areas has the facilities to test which gas was used. Yet medical sources in northern Syria have told The Times that in the immediate aftermath of the attack a team from “an American medical agency” arrived at the hospital in Afrin. They took hair samples from the casualties for testing at ‘an American laboratory.’
 * It is likely that these samples formed part of the evidence cited by the US Defence Secretary yesterday.”
 * Really? A CW attack takes place in the middle of the night in Aleppo, and in its “immediate aftermath” an “American medical agency” arrives to collect samples for testing?
 * It is likely that all the speculation in the past few days revolves around an incident that is looking more and more like the “false flag” operations anti-rebel Syrians have been warning about this past year. Given where the “evidence” is coming from, and the alleged presence of a western or American “medical agency” present on the ground, it is quite remarkable that Washington went full-court press on this.
 * It is likely that all the speculation in the past few days revolves around an incident that is looking more and more like the “false flag” operations anti-rebel Syrians have been warning about this past year. Given where the “evidence” is coming from, and the alleged presence of a western or American “medical agency” present on the ground, it is quite remarkable that Washington went full-court press on this.

This seems to be about the same incident as well. Except Afrin/Ifreen is way the heck north of rebel-held Sheiqh Maqsoud, half way to Turkey. Did that happen? Did the samples show sarin, phosgene, chlorine, or none of the above? --Caustic Logic (talk) 11:41, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Main Video
Video, 0:31, included with the Daily Mail article: "The video was posted on the Facebook page of British-trained doctor Niazi Habash, who treated some of the Aleppo victims." Also at these Youtube postings that popped up first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtfXchDny0k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf6P3e6XD48

Initial assessment: At least four people are shown affected in a hospital setting, two women and two men. I hear sarin kills quickly when it does, so these are not apparently any of those who died, unless something else intervened. One woman seems real from her body language, in distress and very sad (0:08-0:12). The other might be real too, but it's more complicated - she's the same woman shown in SOHR photos (image 3), apparently alive here, no mucous bubbles, different room. But she looked dead in the SOHR image (So did the kids), so was it later? Nothing else says fake - alive, getting air, (then?) dead and covered with bubbles and snot. Also, she has what look like burns or nasty rash on her face (right cheek mainly), perhaps from that cloud of partly hydrochloric acid that chlorine's supposed to make when mixed with (water? - yes - mixed with saline, salty water). The burns are there when she's still alive, that's part of how I identified her. --Caustic Logic (talk) 11:41, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

The guy in image 4 I thought had a plugged nose is one of the two possible rebel fighters seen "foaming" here. Only the men do that, unlike the woman or the child, and no men died. That was when the white stuff first started coming out. Here (0:04-0:06), it's run down his face, looking like milk. The other allegedly affected man has the white stuff, a little foamier, on his chin, not lip. He acts like he has a headache or something, unconvincing. Both of them. --Caustic Logic (talk) 11:41, 1 May 2013 (UTC)--Caustic Logic (talk) 10:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Azad Video
Global Post posting: "This unedited video was shot by Kurdish media activist Rojhit Azad and obtained by GlobalPost Senior Correspondent Tracey Shelton." Video attached to this article wherte the supposed husband of the hit family speaks -out of it for two days, woke to a dead wife and kids. Not convinced, but could be. --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:24, 15 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The original interview with the survivor Yasser Yunis, on whose home the sarin-filled riot control grenade was dropped killing his wife and two sons, appears to be in this article on 23 April 2013 in The Times (Revealed: tragic victims of Syria's nerve gas war; Anthony Loyd in Aleppo reports on the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons against his own people Tragic victims of Assad's nerve gas war. 26 April 2013, behind paywall). However the VDC records that Yasser Yunis was killed along with his wife and two other male family members (one a child) on 13 April.


 * The article notes that "Subsequent video footage taken by the medical staff at the hospital in Afrin, an hour's drive from Aleppo, provided even more compelling evidence. Provided to The Times by Dr Kawa Hassan, an orthopaedic surgeon who received the first casualties at about 4am, it shows victims, among them Yasser and his dying wife, frothing at the mouth and nose in a trance-like state. A rescuer overcome by the gas is making repetitive arm movements as if he were having an epileptic fit, typical of nerve agent poisoning."


 * CL: is this consistent with being the video that you describe below? Evidently the person in the video matches the person interviewed by Loyd - but presumably the real Yasser Yunis was dead.   This attack was one of those from which physiological samples were shipped to Porton Down and reported by David Cameron on 14 June to have tested positive for sarin Pmr9 (talk) 13:48, 21 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I can't get it to play now, and I don't know what this other Yaser looks like anyway - but they're said to match. And it sounds consistent - they say he lived. VDC said he died, wife may be listed (maiden name). Simple answer is the VDC listing is wrong, but other answers include that it's right, he died, and the guy doing interviews is a faker. Did 14 people die? That's what VDC lists but at the time it was just 4 reported - 2 boys and 2 women, with the 9/10 men missing. (should note that in right spot) --Caustic Logic (talk) 23:20, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

I've watched this video pretty carefully, and realize some things I've been missing - this is the source for the SOHR's early stills, except one of the kids. Two are shown, and one is the same, but the other appears closer to the 18 months old than the other kid SOHR showed. All appear as much asleep as dead - unclear. The apparently dead woman isn't. She looks that way at first, even on this video, but later talks to the camera with the bubbles out her nose and mouth (7:38), looking fake now. There are three males here doing the milk out their mouths/nose thing, and also "convulsing" in an unconvincing manner, too mellow and continuous - no sense of crisis, just pacing, ready to keep it up for a 5-minute video if needed. Two are the same as the other video, a third guy in a leather jacket joins them here. There's also what I think is a different other woman here (for three total between the videos). She wears black and stylish makeup. Jihadists wouldn't like her. Symptoms - no tremors or "foam," just laying still and looking unhappy, feet beaten and tortured-bloody spots, bruised, swollen badly, especially at the ankles (6:20). What chemical does that? Gender segregation of symptoms: men foam and convulse, women don't convulse, sometimes foam, kids just die. --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:24, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

At the beginning, the scene of the gassing, the stairwell with the grenade remnants. There's blood along the ground by the stairs. Victims coughing blood, shrapnel injury, or what? Plastic covers the stairwell (enclosing?), lightly held down with rocks, I guess previously, to keep out rain. The plastic is torn through in a spot, somewhat on the side, and the cameraman suggests the grenade was tossed through that hole. Hard to see this falling from a helicopter and tearing such a hole itself just on gravity. But it wasn't by itself - An apparent second grenade (or ??) is on the step above the plastic one - flayed out and burnt. Two chem grenades for some deadly combo? Did they both fall through the same hole? What luck if so. Red-line-crossing regime scum. --Caustic Logic (talk) 10:24, 15 May 2013 (UTC)