Robert Fisk's bombshell first-hand account for the UK Independent runs contrary to nearly every claim circulating in major international press concerning what happened just over week ago on April 7th in an embattled suburb outside Damascus: not only has the veteran British journalist found no evidence of a mass chemical attack, but he's encountered multiple local eyewitnesses who experienced the chaos of that night, but who say the gas attack never happened.
Fisk is the first Western journalist to reach and report from the site of the alleged chemical weapons attack widely blamed on Assad's forces. Writing from Douma in eastern Ghouta, Fisk has interviewed a Syrian doctor who works at the hospital shown in one of the well-known videos which purports to depict victims of a chemical attack.
Importantly, the report, published late in the day Monday, is causing a stir among mainstream journalists who–minutes after the Saudi-sponsored jihadist group Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) accused the Syrian Army of gassing civilians–began uncritically promoting the "Assad gassed his own people" narrative as an already cemented and "proven" fact based on the mere word a notoriously brutal armed group who itself has admitted to using chemical weapons on the Syrian battlefield in prior years. Also notable is that no journalist or international observer was anywhere near Douma when the purported chemical attack took place.
Controversy ensued immediately after Fisk's report, especially as he is among the most recognizable names in the past four decades of Middle East war reporting, having twice won the British Press Awards' Journalist of the Year prize and as seven time winner of the British Press Awards' Foreign Correspondent of the Year (the NY Times has referred to him as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain" while The Guardian has called him "one of the most famous journalists in the world"). An Arabic speaker, Fisk became famous for being among the few reporters in history to conduct face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden, which he did on three occasions between 1993 and 1997.
Fisk says he was able to walk around and investigate newly liberated Douma without Syrian government or Russian minders (in part this is likely because he has reported from inside Syria going back decades, in war-torn 1982 Hama, for example), and he begins his account as follows:
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks–and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world– despite all the doubters–is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
Fisk goes on to identify the doctor by name - Dr. Assim Rahaibani - which is notable given the fact that all early reporting from Douma typically relied on "unnamed doctors" and anonymous opposition sources for early claims of a chlorine gas attack (lately morphed into an unverified "mixed" chlorine-and-sarin attack).
The doctor's testimony is consistent with that of the well-known Syrian opposition group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which initially reported based on its own pro-rebel sourcing that heavy government bombardment of Douma city resulted in the collapse of homes and underground shelters, causing civilians in hiding to suffocate.
According to SOHR, which has long been a key go-to source for mainstream media over the course of the war, "70 of them [women and children] have suffered suffocation as a result of the demolition of home basements over them due to the heavy and intense shelling."
Though outlets from The Guardian to The Washington Post to The New York Times have quoted SOHR on a near daily basis throughout the past six years of war, the anti-Assad opposition outlet's reporting of mass asphyxiation due to collapse of shelters has been notably absent from the same publications.
Fisk details the Syrian doctor's testimony, who is adamant in his emphasis that civilians were suffocating en masse, and were not gassed:
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic–“Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city–is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night–but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia–not gas poisoning.”
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories–which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.
These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian–yes, Russian–rockets and burned-out cars.
And further fascinating is that the veteran British war correspondent comes upon local Douma residents who have so long been trapped in an isolated 'fog of war' battlefield environment, that they are not even aware of the international importance that the town has played in the US coalition decision to bomb Syria:
After speaking with eyewitnesses on the ground in Syria, even mainstream media are beginning to cast doubt on the West’s narrative of an alleged gas attack in Douma, as medics tell French, German and UK media it never happened.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world’s third largest news agency, and the Independent, a British online newspaper, have each published stories that question whether chlorine or any other chemical was used against Syrians in Eastern Ghouta on April 7.
In a French language video report, AFP spoke with Marwan Jaber, a medical student who witnessed the aftermath of the alleged attack.
@AFP translates the words of a doctor in Douma who confirms that on that fateful day nobody came into the hospital with symptoms of a chemical attack. This directly contradicts the words of the French President.https://t.co/vbfP58yZUppic.twitter.com/rL1sepuc24
— Ollie Richardson (@O_Rich_) April 17, 2018
“Some of [the victims] suffered from asthma and pulmonary inflammation. They received routine treatment and some were even sent home,” Jaber told AFP. “They showed no symptoms of a chemical attack. But some foreigners entered while we were in a state of chaos and sprinkled people with water, and some of them were even filming it.”
Jaber’s testimony is consistent with claims made by a Douma doctor who spoke with veteran UK journalist Robert Fisk. Although Dr. Assim Rahaibani did not personally witness what happened in the medical clinic, he said that “all the doctors” he works with “know what happened.”
According to Rahaibani, intense shelling had created dust clouds that seeped into the basements and cellars where people lived. “People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White Helmet’, shouted ‘Gas!’, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Meanwhile, a report aired by the German RTL Group-owned channel n-tv says it’s unclear whether the attack took place at all, given that most of the locals told them on camera they didn’t smell any chemicals at all, one local told them he remembers a “weird smell” and was fine after a glass of water, and one man, who didn’t want to show his face, insisted there was a “smell of chlorine.”
However, a local doctor told the channel: “Saturday, a week ago, we treated people with breathing problems, but chlorine or gas poisoning – no, those are different symptoms.”
The German broadcaster @ntvde interviewed a doctor working in the hospital in Duma:"There were no patients with symptoms of a chemical gas attack!" pic.twitter.com/wctxv50Gl6— Stan (@StanM3) April 17, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment