The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss a chemical weapons attack in Syria that has killed scores of people, amid a continuing global chorus of condemnation over the incident.
\nObservers, diplomats and analysts are blaming the incident in the town of Khan Sheikhoun on forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies. The World Health Organization says the victims appear to show symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent.
\nAn umbrella organization of Western relief groups put the death toll at 100 with more than 350 others stricken.
\nRussia has \u201ccategorically denied\u201d any role in the attack, blaming the incident on Syrian warplanes striking a warehouse or factory storing chemical weapons possessed by rebel forces. Syria\u2019s government has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons against civilians throughout the six-year war<\/p>\n
Reaction<\/strong> \u2018Horrifying massacre\u2019<\/strong> The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss a chemical weapons attack in Syria that has killed scores of people, amid a continuing global chorus of condemnation over the incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c59-islamic-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nA U.S. intelligence official said the strike in northern Idlib province \u201chas the fingerprints of a regime attack.\u201d The official said if the Assad government\u2019s responsibility is confirmed, the number of dead and wounded \u201cwould make it the biggest incident like this since the Syrian regime\u2019s August 2013 Sarin attack on the Damascus suburbs.\u201d
\nAt the Vatican Wednesday, Pope Francis said he deplored \u201cthe unacceptable massacre.\u201d
\nU.S. President Donald Trump denounced the attack as \u201creprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world\u201d in a statement released by the White House Tuesday.
\nSpeaking at the start of major international meeting in Brussels on the future of Syria, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said \u201call the evidence\u201d he has seen suggests the Assad regime carried out the attacks, and said it was impossible to imagine the regime having any legitimate authority over the war-torn country.
\nFar to the south, monitors from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 25 others, many of them women and children, were killed Tuesday in airstrikes at several sites east of Damascus.<\/p>\n
\nThe gas attack at Kahn Sheikhoun, described by the opposition Syrian National Coalition as a \u201chorrifying massacre,\u201d is widely believed to be the worst such violation of international law in war-ravaged Syria since 2013, when a U.N. probe found credible evidence that sarin gas killed hundreds of civilians near Damascus.
\nThe coalition urged U.N. officials to \u201copen an immediate investigation\u201d and take the necessary measures to ensure the officials, perpetrators and supporters are held accountable.
\nThe reported attack on Khan Sheikhoun to the west of Aleppo and south of the city of Idlib, the provincial capital, is the third claimed chemical weapons attack in just over a week in Syria. Another two blamed on the Syrian government were reported in Hama province, not far from Khan Sheikhoun.
\nEarlier this year, the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the Syrian government of mounting eight chlorine gas attacks on insurgent-controlled areas during the final weeks of the battle for Aleppo. A joint investigation by the United Nations and international chemical weapons experts blamed the Syrian government for at least three chlorine attacks in 2014 and 2015.
\nIdlib province is one of the last strongholds of anti-Assad rebels and U.N. analysts estimate there are nearly a million displaced Syrians in the province, many from Aleppo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"