More than half a million Syrians have been killed over the course of Syria’s ongoing war, according to the United Nations, but only a fraction of those deaths happened as a result of 34 confirmed chemical attacks allegedly launched by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his war against armed opposition groups in the country.
With the disparity in the number of deaths attributed to the use of conventional weapons and chemical ones, civilians, who have lived through assaults of both kinds, wonder why chemical attacks constitute a “red line” to the United States and its western allies, while “barrel bombs and live artillery” do not.
