MOSCOW, May 13 (RIA Novosti), Nastassia Astrasheuskaya – New cases of confirmed chemical attacks in Syria have sparked talks about their effects on public health, with doctors denying media reports of a link between the attacks and birth defects among newborns.
Bassam al-Ahmad, a spokesman for the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, told RIA Novosti doctors from Eastern Ghouta, an agricultural area near Damascus hit by a gas attack and where a defect case was found recently, saw no link between the defects and the attacks in August of 2013 and in April this year.
Al Arabiya News reported on Sunday that allegations were mounting after a picture of a deformed baby girl from Damascus, who died shortly after birth, appeared online.
"Doctors from East Ghouta didn't confirm this reason for the defects, and one of them said this deformation was due to genes," al-Ahmad told RIA Novosti in an e-mail, adding the doctor found the defect "inconsistent" with deformations caused by chemical weapons.
Children's health and rights organizations active in Syria also could not confirm the link. A Chief Communications Officer at UNICEF Syria, Kumar Tiku, said that although his organization followed closely the post-attacks developments, he heard of no chemical-related defect cases in newborns.
Chemical gas was used in Syria in two separate areas of Ghouta on August 21, according to Human Rights Watch, killing at least 1,000 civilians, including women and children. Some 3,600 persons were treated for symptoms, according to Doctors Without Borders.
On Tuesday, HRW said it had "strong evidence" the Syrian Army used chlorine gas on insurgents in several cities last month.
"Evidence strongly suggests that Syrian government helicopters dropped barrel bombs embedded with cylinders of chlorine gas on three towns in Northern Syria in mid-April 2014," the human rights group said in a statement.
Earlier reports said chlorine gas was used in clashes between the Syrian Army and rebels near the town of Kfar Zeita on April 11-13, which resulted in two killed and about a hundred injured. Damascus blamed the chemical attack on the Islamic group Jabhat al-Nusra, a branch of al-Qaeda operating in Syria and Lebanon.
Over 92 percent of Syria's chemical stockpile has been removed from the country, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said at the end of April. The remaining 16 containers with chemical weapons are stored near Damascus in the area occupied by opposition groups.
Syria’s most dangerous chemicals are scheduled to be destroyed by the end of June as part of a cooperative effort to defuse international tensions in the ongoing civil war.
Russia, the US, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Finland have contributed military equipment and personnel to the effort to transport chemical weapons out of Syria for destruction by hydrolysis in international waters.
