On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a targeted missile strike at a Syrian airbase from where sarin gas attacks were launched at the town of Khan Sheikhoun earlier in the week.
The chemical attack, blamed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, resulted in at least 70 dead. The international community was left shocked by footage of young children convulsing, foaming in the mouth and lying limp.
Trump would later credit those images for changing his attitude toward the Syrian conflict.
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Sarin is a nerve agent, meaning it attacks the nervous system. Low-level exposure can cause symptoms such as blurred vision, diarrhea, chest tightness, drooling and confusion, according to the Centers for Disease Control. High doses can result in paralysis, convulsions and respiratory failure, which can lead to death.
The dangers of sarin exposure are accentuated by the fact that it can be spread through air, water, food and even clothing. What’s more, it has no odour, making it difficult to detect until symptoms begin to appear.
Antidotes are available, but they have to be administered as soon as possible after exposure.
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But when German chemist Gerhard Schrader discovered sarin in 1938, he probably didn’t think the colourless, innocuous-looking liquid would, nearly 80 years later, be responsible for provoking American military intervention in Syria.
At the time, Schrader worked for pharmaceutical company Bayer AG — yes, the same Bayer that trademarked Aspirin — as a pesticide researcher, according to a biography prepared by the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
While experimenting with compounds that killed insects by disrupting their nervous system, Schrader accidentally discovered sarin and three other highly toxic nerve agents.
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Although poisonous chemicals like mustard and chlorine gas were widely used during the First World War, taking 12,000 Canadian lives (according to the Canadian War Museum), sarin remained a closely guarded German secret until Allied forces came upon Nazi chemical facilities in 1945, claims a paper in the Army Chemical Review.
However, it would be another three decades before sarin was deployed as a chemical weapon. The perpetrator was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and the victims were several thousand Kurds, targeted because they sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.
Five years later in 1993, the UN adopted the Chemical Weapons Convention, which banned member states from producing and stockpiling various chemical weapons, including sarin.
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But just the following year, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas in a residential neighbourhood in the city of Matsumoto, killing eight people. Nine months later, cult members released sarin in the Tokyo subway during rush hour, killing 12 and injuring dozens.
Fast forward to 2013, and sarin began to make its presence felt in the early stages of the Syrian civil war. On Aug. 21, 2013, a chemical attack on a rebel-held neighbourhood in Damascus killed hundreds of civilians and wounded thousands more.
Soon after, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, with Assad’s regime joining the Chemical Weapons Convention under a deal brokered by Russia, Syria’s closest ally, and the U.S.
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But the deal did little for the residents of Khan Sheikhoun, 70 of whom were killed by a chemical attack earlier this week. Experts from the U.S., Turkey and medical charity Medicins Sans Frontières all concluded that the symptoms and high number of casualties strongly pointed towards the use of sarin by the Syrian regime.
“Among the victims of the attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun who were transferred to the Bab al-Hawa hospital … near the Turkish border, MSF saw eight patients with symptoms — dilated pupils, muscle spasms, involuntary defecation — consistent with exposure to neuro-toxic agents such as sarin,” MSF said in a statement.
Inadvertently discovered as the result of attempts to find a better way to kill agriculture pests, sarin has never been used for that purpose.
It will instead go down in history as a ghastly chemical weapon responsible for taking thousands of human lives over a 30-year period.
— With files from Reuters
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