As the war rages on in Syria with no solution in sight, the painful memories of the chemical attack on the town of Douma in 2018 are still fresh in the minds of those who survived despite the years.
Seventy-eight people were killed when the Bashar Assad regime carried out a chemical attack on the Douma district in eastern Ghouta near Damascus on April 7, 2018. Hundreds more were injured.
Syrian regime forces carried out two airborne chemical attacks within three hours and hundreds of civilians were forced to abandon their homes and get treatment after being exposed to poisonous gas, mostly women and children.
Twelve-year-old Ibrahim Hibbiye told Anadolu Agency (AA): "We were in shelters then. Warplanes were attacking. There were also intense airstrikes a day before the chemical attack. These were such frequent and so violent that we almost got used to it. With the attacks on the next day, we were breathing chemicals."
Hibbiye said the ongoing bombardments made it difficult to flee the chemical gas.
"We had difficulty breathing, we were suffocating. We tried to make masks by sopping cloth pieces into water. As I left the shelter, I saw blood and dead bodies outside. After the attack, the army threatened us and said ‘either we will shoot you with chemicals or you leave Douma.’ So we decided to leave."
Hibbiye added that regime forces killed 17 of his relatives, including two of his brothers.
"The regime has done much cruelty, many people died, many people got displaced. I dream of returning to my home and live together with my relatives in a country without Assad," said Hibbiye, who currently lives in northern al-Bab close to the Turkish border.
Five days following the attack on civilians, Russia announced that regime forces had taken control of Douma and eastern Ghouta.
Russia joined Syria’s 10-year conflict in September 2015, when the regime military appeared close to collapse, and has since helped in tipping the balance of power in favor of Assad, whose forces now control much of the country. Hundreds of Russian troops are deployed across Syria and they also have a military air base along Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
The Assad regime's use of chemical weapons was confirmed by United Nations investigators as well as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, the Netherlands.
The OPCW confirmed the regime's use of chemical weapons on March 1, 2019. The organization determined after a nearly yearlong probe that there are "reasonable grounds" that chlorine was used as a weapon in the Douma district of eastern Ghouta in 2018.
Ebu Izzet Hibbiye, a father and a witness to the chemical attack on Douma, described the aftermath. "I was close to the scene of the incident, when I arrived there I saw that people died. The area attacked was close to a health point."
"The scene was unimaginable. I lost my mind. There was foam coming out of the mouths of people that were being carried to the emergency unit, their eyes seemed to be popping out of their places. I could not breathe in the face of this scene. They attacked us with sarin gas."
He added that he and others were being forcefully sent to opposition-held areas.
"Assad, Iran and Russia have put us into this situation."
The regime has survived nine years of conflict yet is still far from being a proponent of a solution that would end all hostilities. It has blocked several negotiation attempts of a constitutional committee and a U.N.-brokered process to find a political solution.
For years, the Assad regime has ignored the needs and safety of the Syrian people, only eyeing further gains of territory and crushing the opposition. With this aim, the regime has for years bombed vital facilities like schools, hospitals and residential areas, causing the displacement of almost half of the country’s population.