In the areas controlled by rebelsSyrians are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the sarin gas attack in Eastern Ghouta and Muadamiyah al-Sham that killed 1,400 people, a crime attributed to Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces that remains unpunished.

At August 21, 2013the forces of the Damascus regime are launching attacks on these two areas that are close to Damascus and were then in the hands of the rebels.

The images of men, women and especially children, lifeless with the characteristic foam on the lips shocked the world. Entire families were wiped out, according to the rebels.

Demonstrations are taking place today in many cities in the zones that escape the control of the Damascus regime.

“We are not organizing this event to remember the massacre, because we have never forgotten it,” says one of the survivors of the attack in the city of Afrin.

“We continue to insist on the need to hold Mr Bashar al-Assadthe first responsible,” he says, adding that unfortunately, due to the people’s inaction, the regime continued to commit other massacres.

The United States has recorded 1,429 dead from the sarin attack, among them 426 children and accuse Damascus of carrying out the attack by violating the “red line” that had been set by the then president Barack Obama for military intervention in Syria.

But this massacre is a turning point for the war in Syria: the United States avoids at the last minute to go ahead with its allies in military strikes against the regime and accepts the proposal of Russia, an ally of Damascus, to “destroy” it chemical arsenal of the Syrian regime.

“Judgment Day”

“It was an Apocalypse image. A scene indescribable, like the Day of Judgment,” says Mohammad Suleiman, a rescuer who lost five members of his family in Zamalka and remembers the piled up lifeless bodies.

Many of those who survived fled to northern Syria, which was still under rebel control when Ghouta fell to Damascus forces in 2018.

“I smelled death. I started taking the bodies to a nearby medical center,” says the rescuer, clarifying that he had covered his face to protect himself from the gas fumes.

He is said to have identified the bodies of his father and his neighbors who had been transferred to a center near his home. “They had numbers. My father was number 95.” His brother, his wife and two of their children also died.

“We dug one up common pit to bury hundreds of corpses. We hope that the countries of the whole world will be able to punish those responsible for this massacre”, he says.

Many reports and investigations blame Bashar al-Assad’s regime for other chemical attacks in the war that began in 2011 with the suppression of peaceful pro-democracy protests. Over half a million people lost their lives and millions became refugees.