Syria, Russia deny chemical attack as death toll climbs

Russia and Syria denied a chemical attack was perpetrated in Idlib province, pushing back against international suspicions that the Assad regime massacred dozens and left others suffocating on the streets.

Russia blamed the deaths on rebels, saying in a Defense Ministry statement that the Syrian air force hit an ammunition depot near Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday because “terrorists” were moving chemical weapons from a warehouse to a location in Iraq. The Syrian army “categorically denied” that it used chemical weapons and also blamed the deaths on “armed terrorist groups,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.

The fatality toll rose to at least 75 people, including 20 children, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday.

The incident raised suspicions of Syrian non-compliance with a deal to destroy its chemical weapons, brokered by the US and Russia after an August 2013 sarin gas attack killed more than 1,000 people in a Damascus suburb. International outrage focused on the Assad government, which, with the help of Russia and Iran, has turned around its battleground fortunes.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Russia and Iran “bear great moral responsibility for these deaths.” “We call upon Russia and Iran, yet again, to exercise their influence over the Syrian regime and to guarantee that this sort of horrific attack never happens again,” Tillerson said in a statement.

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appeared to be responsible for the “barbaric attack.” 

The United Nations Security Council called an emergency session to discuss it, and the European Union was to hold a previously scheduled meeting on Syria in Brussels.

SOHR, which monitors the war through a network of activists, said its on-the-ground sources reported that one neighborhood “was bombed with material believed to be gases which caused suffocation and other symptoms, like intense breathing secretion, iris shrinkage, pail, general spasm, and other symptoms.” It said warplanes attacked the area but it didn’t identify them.

A UN estimate from April 2016 put the overall death toll from six years of violence at 400,000, with more than half of the country’s 23 million people displaced. Hundreds of thousands fled to Europe in 2015 alone and outside powers have been pulled into the conflict. Russia and Iran, along with its Lebanese Hezbollah proxy, are conducting military operations to prop up the Assad government, while the U.S. has armed opposition groups. International efforts to end the conflict have failed.

--With assistance from Donna Abu-Nasr and Anna Andrianova

©2017 Bloomberg L.P.