A man is treated at a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo after being wounded in what the government and rebels said was a chemical weapons attack.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government and Syrian activists traded accusations on using chemical weapons in the northern province of Aleppo on Tuesday.
Whether chemical weapons had indeed been used could not be immediately confirmed.
The Syrian rebel forces are not known to possess chemical weapons, while the government has large stockpiles. There has long been a fear on all sides — in the Syrian government, in neighboring Israel and among the rebels’ western backers — that rebel groups could seize chemical weapons, but it is unclear whether any such weapons have been loaded onto rockets or missiles for use, or whether the rebels would be able to fire them if they were.
The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said “terrorists” fired a rocket “containing chemical materials” into the Khan al-Assal area of Aleppo, and a government official told state television that the episode would be reported to human rights organizations and to countries supporting the rebels.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog group, said witnesses heard over walkie-talkies that 26 people were killed, including 16 government soldiers and 10 civilians, after a rocket landed on Khan al-Assal. Activists said the government tried to hit the police academy there, which was recently taken by rebel forces, with a Scud missile, but it accidentally fell on a government-controlled area instead.
Mahmoud Moussa, an anti-government activist, said that activists in Aleppo and Damascus reported that the government had used chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal in Aleppo and in Al Atebah in the eastern countryside of Damascus. None of the reports could be confirmed. President Obama has said that a chemical attack would cross a “red line” that could prompt military intervention by the United States. Israel has said it would intervene to stop chemical weapons from slipping out of the Syrian government’s control and into the hands of either the rebels or Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group allied with the Syrian government.
Rebel factions have accused the government of using chemical weapons many times, but there have been no confirmed cases. The term “chemical weapons” has sometimes appeared to be used loosely to include not just deadly agents like sarin gas but also tear gas and other irritants used for crowd control.
The Syrian information minister, Omran al-Zoabi, was quoted by state television saying that Turkey and Qatar, which have backed the rebels in the conflict, bore “legal, moral and political responsibility” for the chemical weapons attack, Reuters reported. A Turkish government official called the claim baseless, the news agency said.
Last week, Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Israel’s head of military intelligence, warned that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was “making advance preparations to use chemical weapons.”
General Kochavi, speaking at a security conference in Israel, said Mr. Assad “did not give the order yet, but is preparing for it.”
SANA published photographs of what it said were civilian victims of the alleged attack that showed men, women and children on hospital beds or stretchers, some of them hooked up to drips or under the care of medics. Several of the patients had what appeared to be devices to help them breathe.
The report said that “terrorists” fired a missile containing chemical materials into Khan al-Assal, killing 25 people and wounding 86, most of them seriously.
A Reuters photographer was quoted in a report by the news agency as saying that the victims he had visited in Aleppo hospitals were suffering breathing problems.
"I saw mostly women and children," said the photographer, who Reuters said it could not quote by name out of concern for his safety.
"They said that people were suffocating in the streets and the air smelt strongly of chlorine."
The photographer quoted victims he met at the University of Aleppo hospital and the al-Rajaa hospital as saying: "People were dying in the streets and in their houses."
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank.
