Anniversary of chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun reminds why the sanctions against Assad are needed
Aleppo countryside, April 6, 2020 — On the fourth of April 2017, the Syrian regime carried out a chemical weapons attack in the city of Khan Sheikhoun, a town in the countryside of Hama, killing nearly a hundred civilians and wounding hundreds of others, mostly children.
On this anniversary, the Syrian Association for Citizens’s Dignity (Karama) reminds Syrians and the international community of this hideous war crime against the Syrian people. Such use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime and the systematic attacks conducted from joint air bases with Russian and Iranian forces has always been a part of the wider strategy of demographic change in Syria, which has resulted in the displacement of millions of Syrians.
Since 2013, the Syrian regime has carried out more than 145 attacks using prohibited chemical weapons in residential areas, including the attack on the village of Khan Al-Asal in March 2013; the bombing of Eastern Ghouta which killed hundreds of people in August 2013; attacks on Old Homs in January 2013, Saraqib in April 2014, Kafr Zita in October 2014, Aleppo city in August 2016, in addition to the bombing of Khan Sheikhoun in April of 2017.
Apart from the killing and wounding of civilians, these attacks resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of people from different regions. Chemical attacks aimed to terrify and pressure the local population to leave their homes in Old Homs, Damascus countryside, Hama countryside and Idlib countryside, the city of Aleppo and other areas. The terror directed at civilians at these areas by the Syrian regime and its allies was always part of a clear pattern of achieving demographic change through forced displacement triggered by the use of chemical weapons, starvation and siege.
This grim anniversary is marked by the continued impunity for the atrocities like the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun and, shockingly, by the regime’s concerted effort to use the pretext of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic to have economic sanctions against it lifted. We use this occasion to reaffirm that lifting economic sanctions on the regime will enable it to commit new crimes against the Syrians and displace more civilians, as happened in recent months in northwest of Syria.
The most effective way to help Syrians to confront the pandemic is to pressure the Syrian regime to take the correct, necessary measures to protect the Syrians, including the full transparency about the number of cases, proper description of the disease, protection of medical staff and other measure employed elsewhere. The most important first step in preventing the catastrophic impact of the pandemic would be to release tens of thousands of detainees deprived of the minimal access to health care in regime’s prisons. The economic sanctions against the regime for crimes committed against its own people, like the Khan Sheikhoun attack, do not include medical aid and should not be subject of manipulation at these difficult times for all, and especially for Syrians displaced by such atrocities.
