46 The Times Magazineaccounts of chemical attacks in Syria ten years
later should be met with suspicion. The extent
of doubt was virulent.
I first spoke with de Bretton-Gordon in April
2013, after I reported in Aleppo on a sarin gas
attack in which a single canister dropped by
a helicopter plunged through the rooftop
stairwell of a Kurdish family in the Sheikh
Maqsood quarter of the city, releasing vapour
that killed a young mother and her two infant
children. They died in a local hospital, froth
pouring from their mouths. Thirteen others,
including rescuers and medical staff, were
overcome by symptoms including foaming
mouths, hallucinations and twitching limbs.
Despite entering the family’s house,
speaking with survivors and medical staff who
had treated casualties, and obtaining video
filmed by Kurdish doctors that showed the
casualties frothing and twitching, I discovered
that many in the UK simply refused to accept
that chemical weapons were being used. Even
when samples removed from the scene of the
attack had been taken to Porton Down and
tested positive for sarin nerve gas, public
scepticism remained, and the evidential “chain
of custody” – the sequence of recorded steps
that safeguards samples from being tampered
with between a chemical attack site and a
laboratory analysis – was full of holes.
De Bretton-Gordon was noncommittal
on the case when I phoned him and detailed
what I had learnt. He had left the army
a couple of years earlier as a full colonel
and had set up SecureBio, a company
specialising in chemical weapon consultancy,
so was an obvious port of call.
Although he demurred on passing
judgment as to the likely type of gas used
in the Sheikh Maqsood attack, he warned
of an emerging pattern of small chemical
attacks by the Assad regime aimed at testing
western resolve, and predicted that much
worse would likely follow.
“The regime is prepared to follow
the thickness of ‘the red line’ to test its
boundaries,” he told me.
Without a credible system to extract
samples from chemical attack sites in Syria
for analysis abroad, he realised that not only
would there be no proof of chemical weapon
use, but the attacks would likely proliferate.
“I knew we would get nowhere without
samples,” he says. “I was convinced that Assad
was going to use this stuff again. He was
testing resolve with those early attacks.
Obama had said the use of chemical weapons
was ‘a red line’. Well, by then Assad had used
them at least three times and f*** all was done
about it. People didn’t believe it. And they
would only believe it with the evidence.”
Just three weeks after our first
conversation, in May 2013 he entered Syria
himself in an attempt to get a sample from thelatest suspected chemical attack site at
Saraqeb, where once again a helicopter
had dropped canisters trailing vapour that
caused casualties who all displayed the same
frothing at the mouth, trance state and
pinpointed pupils.
It was a bold plan. Northern Syria at that
time was a patchwork of rebel fiefdoms, many
of them suspicious or openly hostile towards
westerners, and Islamic State was on the
ascent. It took some cool to enter as an
individual to collect samples from a chemical
attack, liable to accusations of espionage,
knowing that if something went wrong help
was far from hand.
The gambit failed. Although a courier
managed to deliver a sample from the attack
site to de Bretton-Gordon in a cooler bag,
unnerved by vehicle searches by Turkish
troops at the border he was forced to bury
it by the roadside in Syria, and crossed back
to Turkey empty-handed.
That was the first of ten trips he was to
make to Syria, some in the company of David
Nott, the renowned surgeon, others in the
company of Syrian medical staff whom
de Bretton-Gordon began to train: at first in
the recognition and treatment of chemical
casualties, then latterly in the collection and
preservation of samples from attack sites too.
On one occasion he travelled to teach
doctors in the countryside in a minibus,
passing through an Isis checkpoint disguised
as “Dr Abdullah”, complete with a fake beard
and ID; on another occasion a hospital in
Bab-al Hawa was flooded with casualties from
a barrel bombing as he was giving a lesson.
The wounds caused by barrel bombs are
grotesque and de Bretton-Gordon recalled
being so shocked, physically and emotionally
sickened by the injuries, that he called off the
lesson to allow the attendant doctors to treat
the wounded.
“But the doctors refused to leave and asked
me to carry on,” he recalls. “They told me that
any of the medical staff in the hospital could
treat conventional blast and shrapnel wounds,
but that they needed my knowledge on how
to treat chemical weapons casualties.”
So he continued with the lesson.
Afterwards, driving back to the Turkish
border, he saw an ambulance carrying one
of the casualties from the bombing, a badly
wounded young girl around eight years old,
stopped at the frontier, apparently lacking
the correct paperwork to carry the girl to a
hospital in Turkey. He stepped out of his car
to intervene. As he argued with border guards
by the open back door of the ambulance the
girl died in front of his eyes.
Twice during our two-hour conversation
he became visibly aggravated. Describing the
girl’s death was one such occasion and his
voice, usually full and fast, faltered.“I can still see her face,” he says. “The back
door was open. She was covered in a towel or
cloth. I remember the smell of blood and flesh.
And... one minute she was still there and, um,
the next she was... dead. And this was from a
barrel bomb on a playground.”
The fate of the girl seemed to epitomise
Syria’s suffering and abandonment.
“I don’t wish to sound trite, but that girl
really resonates,” he continues. “And there
are millions like her around the world who
nobody gives a f*** about. They will die
without even making the dial flicker. That’s
shit. We are here for such a short time – there
are too many people happy to let the clock
tick around. I really feel for people who
cannot help themselves.”Throughout all his Syrian ventures
de Bretton-Gordon, 56, has been accompanied
by one consistent companion: the prospect
of his own sudden death. Shortly after leaving
the army, he collapsed during a run and
was diagnosed with cardiac sudden death
syndrome. A tiny thickening in his heart
meant that it could beat itself to his death
at any moment. An obsessive athlete who
still runs or rows daily, he reacted to news of
the threat to his life by studying Mo Farah’s
running technique, adjusting his style to lower
his heart rate, in addition to taking a daily
dose of beta blockers.
Nevertheless, the threat of sudden death
remains a continuous presence, paring his
perspective of what is essential.
“I think about it almost every hour of every
day,” he admits. “It drives me forward. I went
for a run this morning – it could have been
my last. You could have come to speak today
to someone who wasn’t there any more. I
thought I was indestructible, then one day
I was on my back looking at the sky.”
Further reminder of physical frailty
came last year, when he was diagnosed with
prostate cancer. The oncologist called with the
news while de Bretton-Gordon was teaching
at a hospital in northern Syria. He shrugged
off the impact of the diagnosis, remarking
that he was in a room with a child triple
amputee at the time.
“If I die of Covid I want, ‘He is really
f***ing annoyed’ written on my gravestone,”THE BOY’S SCREAMS
OF PAIN SILENCED THE
MOANS OF LESSER
WOUNDED SOLDIERS
ANTHONY LOYD