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Blasts in the Night, a Smell, and a Flood of Syrian Victims
(New York Times) Ben Hubbard, Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler - Thousands of sick and dying Syrians flooded the hospitals in the Damascus suburbs before dawn, hours after the first rockets landed last Wednesday, their bodies convulsing and mouths foaming. Their vision was blurry and many could not breathe. Doctors worked frantically, injecting the antidote atropine, until supplies ran out. Cars were bringing in entire families - fathers, mothers and children - all of them dead. It was the largest mass killing of the Syrian civil war, and the deadliest chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein's troops killed thousands of Kurds with sarin gas in 1988. When the full U.S. National Security Council assembled, with President Obama presiding, on Saturday morning, "the focus had really shifted to how we respond to this event, not whether we respond," a senior official said.