At least 58 dead in suspected chemical attack in Syria; hospital reportedly hit

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BEIRUT – A monitoring group said Tuesday that at least 35 people had been killed in a suspected chemical attack on a town in northern Syria as European leaders prepared to meet in Brussels to pledge funds for the country’s reconstruction.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring network, said at least 35 people in the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun had been killed after an air strike apparently involving the a gas which had caused many people to choke and faint, and, in some cases, foam at the mouth.

Photographs from the area showed at least a dozen bodies of men, women and children splayed across the ground between two houses. Hussein Sirjawi, an activist who said he had visited a makeshift medical point, described watching around 30 people being treated, most of them children, for suffocation. “Some had saliva coming from their mouths and noses, others were totally oblivious to the chaos around them,” he said.

International donors are set to pledge billions more dollars for Syrian refugees at a two-day conference from Tuesday that the European Union says must also help prepare for an eventual end to more than six years of war in Syria.

Damascus has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons in Syria, despite being widely blamed for a 2013 attack that killed hundreds of people, many of them young children, in the suburbs of Damascus. The strike, at the time, nearly pushed the United States to the verge of military intervention.

In the intervening years, doctors in opposition-held areas say they have repeatedly treated patients for the effects of chemical attacks involving chlorine, or a mix of gases.

(c) 2017, The Washington Post

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