Warning: The following article contains graphic description of violence and/or its effects.
By Adam Larson
Source: Monitor on Massacre
Dr. Mohammed Tennari is the Idlib province Coordinator the Washington DC-based Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a group opposed to Syria’s government and allied with the competing “transitional government” in Turkey. Not far cross the Turkish border in northern Syria, Tennari set up his Field Hospital in the city of Sarmeen (alt. Sarmin – clinic logo at left), southeast of the regional capitol Idlib. This reportedly was started in 2011, supported with funding to hire staff, secure supplies, etc. from SAMS (SAMS), as well as Doctors Without Borders/MSF (MSF), and it continues running today with an unusually transparent and public medical process (see the clinic’s Facebook page for intensive surgery documentation).
He obviously spends some time in Turkey and, recently anyway, transiting to and from points west. Dr. Tennari was in New York on April 16 to address a closed-door session of the UN Security Council said to move everyone to tears. (BBC) Most recently he addressed a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives foreign relations Committee, on June 17 (PDF “transcript” from house.gov). He’s always urging foreign military intervention or, in June, asking alternately for help in “reinforcing and rebuilding secure underground hospitals” to withstand the onslaught, if no one has the fortitude to stop it like they should.
Tennari’s main thrust and selling point in these lobbying efforts has been relating his direct experience with the government’s intolerable chlorine barrel bombs. He came on the national spotlight after his clinic hosted the deaths of three young children, aged 3, 2, and about 1, on March 16, 2015. It was the first and worst of the new round of alleged chlorine attacks in Idlib. These deaths were exactly what he showed to move the UN to tears and, apparently, short-circuit their analytical skills.
This info-offensive with dead babies and calls for war against a Baath party government in the Middle East has been frequently compared to the 1990 Iraq incubator babies disinformation fiasco (many examples in the Guardian’s comments, for example). That dictator-killing-babies story boosted support for the 1991 war on Iraq and was a fiction hatched by the Kuwaiti royal family and PR firm Hill and Knowlton. One big difference is here there undeniably are babies being killed by someone who either has bad aim or very bad morals. But otherwise, the propaganda power of the dead baby should be noted as one reasons to suspect this might be just that – but hatched by a different kind of PR group…
We know Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, was at the time of the incident the leading force deciding who lives and who dies in the Sarmin area. The area would still, even after all the running so many have done, contain some religious enemies – Shi’ites from the nearby and vulnerable village of Fu’ah, Sunnis who they think support the infidel government, etc. These might wind up dead in fits and spurts as soon as there’s a good cover story and some fake names lined up.
As that situation might suggest, the stage Dr. Tennari rose to fame on is troubling one. At right is one sign of serious problems with Tennari’s clinic in al Qaeda territory; Mohammed al-Taleb (as given), the youngest victim of that inaugural attack. On the left is a stray view of him in the general treatment area, sat upright, receiving oxygen by a mask, and having injections at least considered, if not performed. He lived long enough to get to the emergency room. On the right is the more famous view from there. He’s left on his back, apparently vomiting or exuding mucous, depending, and given no breathing assistance, even as he tries once to draw a breath on his own and fails. “Assad” was blamed for his inevitable death, but “Assad” could not stop them from continuing oxygen support, nor from making the other errors that may have helped finish off his sisters Aysha and Sara as well. Please see the explanation at What Killed the Talebs? : “A disturbingly unsuccessful medical effort”)
Exactly one month later, director Tennari spoke to the Security Council session, describing his version of the night’s events with himself at the center of the medical drama. New York Times reports Dr. Tennari “said he tried to save the three children” seen in the videos. Elsewhere he’s said “as quickly as we worked, we could not save them,” (AFP) and – while the grandmother died before arrival – “we tried to treat the others. The children were foaming at the mouth, they were suffocating, then their hearts stopped.” (HRW) Later, he told The Guardian:
“The children who came to us were suffocating and we couldn’t do anything because they had breathed too much chlorine,” Tennari told the Guardian from Idlib, describing the most difficult cases he had to handle. “It’s very distressing to see children suffocating in front of you and you cannot do anything.”
He doesn’t explain why he could not get that mask back on Mohammed’s face, for one thing. Maybe it’s part of the (Islamist?) “fate” concept Civil Defense (“White Helmets”) chief Raed Saleh talked about; referring to one of Mohammed’s sisters, probably Sara Taleb, he said “we did what we could to save her, but dying in silence was her fate. Death in silence before the whole world.” Why is this their “fate” in anti-government hospitals? Why the combination of preventable death, and a global audience for it? The answer can perhaps be sensed in the accompanying calls to “stop the death” – not by enforcing proper medical procedures in this or other rebel clinics, but by starting an air war against the religious enemies of the people the clinic managers are allied with.
There are a number of possibly shifty details Tennari has offered casting some doubt on his true knowledge of the events of March 16. But after that inflammatory introduction, these are best considered in a section below, so we can get to the main question.
Was He Even On the Stage?
As the New York Times related, Dr. Tennari “tried to save the three children shown with their grandmother’s body in the video that he said was taken that night.” From this, there’s little reason he should not be seen in that same video, or set of two videos rather, filmed mainly right around the children as they died. These show everyone who was that close to the central drama, but Dr. Tennari does not seem to be one of them. It’s all but impossible to prove a negative like his not being at the clinic, but from the available video, we can see that he probably wasn’t there, and he almost certainly wasn’t in the emergency room at the crucial time.
The question was first raised and considered in this section of the ACLOS event talk page. Here, you can check for yourself if you like, or have the time. Dr. Tennari looks like this: (see photo).
And here are the emergency room videos, apparently what was shown at the UNSC and for the HFRC, as Dr. Tennari sat there claiming his central involvement in this drama. Can anyone spot him actually in that drama? I can’t: [The following videos contain disturbing images]Video 1: Idlib Civil Defence & Video 2: Jabat al-Nusra
In the first one, we can see only Mohammed is there at the start – anyone helping prior to this wouldn’t be treating “children,” just the one child. Mohammed is alive at the beginning, the girls are brought in halfway through the video, and one person says Aysha is alive (breathing) near the end. In video 2, they all increasingly seem dead. There’s little to no gap between the videos, which show the time when the children died. Any life-saving efforts on them would happen in this span I estimate at 4-6 minutes long. And we see life-saving-type efforts, just poorly done, and mainly after the kids are dead.
Dr. Tennari is not the cameraman for either video, we can presume, so should be one of the people seen, eyes burning or not, hunched over the victims at least part of this time.
There are 7 people of medical relevance outlined here at ACLOS, numbered in order of appearance. Two of these – M1 (right, wearing the Taqiyah cap favored by some Islamists) and M6 (below, on the left) seem to be – or be considered as – qualified doctors. Neither of these men is Dr. Tennari; M1 is too old and lean, while M6 is younger and has all his hair. Is he one of the rescue workers whose faces we can’t fully see? Visually, M4 or M5 (on the right below, holding Aysha so gingerly) could be him, but the director isn’t likely to be working with the rescue teams like that. Is he hiding under a hijab as the one female nurse, M2? Is he one of the other, less relevant, people here? Or is he simply not in the room?
Consider M6, the young doctor (on the left in the image at right). For most of video 1, he’s consistently not seen or sensed in the room, until he appears from the back at 1:34. From there on, he’s clearly in the action through both videos. Dr. Tennari seems to be missing in that same way, but for the whole time.
A less thorough scan of videos from other parts of the filed clinic also failed to reveal any matches. He may have been on-site, just out of frame at times, maybe he is visible and we just can’t see it yet, or he may simply not have been there.
It’s a valid question, then: where was Dr. Tennari?
* Was he there after all? Can anyone out there locate a possible match? Comments below are open.
* He would have less reason to be in New York or Washington before he and his clinic delivered their chlorine attack and dead-babies story – but he is with SAMS, if not a Syrian-American himself. So maybe he was in the US.
* Maybe he was off in Turkey, or even Qatar for example, securing support.
* Maybe he was working elsewhere in Idlib, or elsewhere in Syria, or was at home like he says, but passed out drunk, or something embarrassing.
* Consider: he works and lives mainly in an area run by known terrorist groups and their ideological allies. For all we know he was briefly arrested that night so others could manage the clinic for a while – maybe he had nothing to do with the crime spree (see below), but can’t say anything or they’ll brand him a regime collaborator, execute him, and his children will be the next random victims of “Assad shelling.” That’s an overly-imaginative scenario, but there are a lot of possibilities in that direction, tainting his reliability as a witness. All we know is he flew out of this terrorist-held area to the UN and Capitol Hill and issued some softened demands, something about delivering explosives to kill the religious enemies of those terrorists. All pure coincidence, right?
Crime and Punishment, and Evidence
On June 17, Dr. Tennari presented alongside former ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, and border doctor Annie Sparrow (her “voice cracking with emotion”), who also happens to be the wife of Human Rights Watch CEO Kenneth Roth. All three were quite clear and professional on the point that that the government and its helicopters were behind these chemical attacks, and ideally at least, they should be stopped with some sort of aerial solution. None of them makes note of the unprofessional medical care that contributed to the deaths.
Consider; including the six who died on March 16, the death toll from 30+ alleged chlorine attacks is said to be ten, as of mid-June. Dr. Tennari swears everyone in Idlib is hopelessly terrified anyway, for whatever reason no one can change, and this is both why “Assad” does it and why it must be stopped (see Why Chlorine?). As allegedly used, chlorine counts as a chemical weapon and may well cross Obama’s “red line.” So Tennari has some alleged reason to press for direct U.S. military intervention in Syria. But after the hearing, a report in ABC News passed on signs that the audience was perhaps not as moved as it was hoped.:
Rep. Ted Yoho, R-FL, told the witnesses the committee was introducing a resolution condemning the chlorine attacks that included a “strong recommendation” to the international community requesting no-fly zones to be implemented. However, he said military fly zones shouldn’t be seen as a solution, but a military operation. “I just want to remind everyone that a no fly zone is an act of war,” Yoho said. “We’re attacking a sovereign nation that has not attacked us. They are not a direct threat to the United States.”
“Sure,” Dr. Sparrow might as well have responded, “just get that protective solution in place so the death can stop, like we did in Libya.”
To the commission drafting that request, or those reviewing the request, anyone who reads this … not only is it an act of war, it’s one being requested based on the provided evidence we just looked at parts of. And while we have this case open before us, people of Earth, another important feature of the events of March 16:
the victims in this deadliest chlorine attack were visibly not killed by chlorine at all.
As best explained in the previous article What Killed the Talebs? the children, especially Mohammed, show signs consistent instead with an overdose on some CNS depressant drug, most likely some kind of opiate. This is seriously the best visuals-based assessment anyone has yet made (but open to review). A drug overdose of course would not come from a barrel bomb, but from a person in this Islamist rebel-administered area.
In the case of the girls anyway, and likely with Mohammed as well, the drugging happened before they were brought into Tennari’s clinic. But it was probably done by friends or overlords, and still perhaps using drugs supplied to him by MSF or SAMS and somehow “loaned out.” There was a chemical murder in the area, and a staff that had chances to stop it, but let these pass. Why save a life if the plan is to end it? But why would the same plan hold into the clinic, past its ethical gates?
This really should be considered carefully, and as Tennari and his allies ask, with an eye to some kind of punishment for the perpetrators. It’s a at least as hideous a crime as they say, besides being an elephant-in-the-living-room insult to our collective intelligence. If the facts are as the visual evidence suggests, Dr, Tennari is complicit in these murders and the cover-up. And it’s not even a very good cover-up, just one that the ruling elite is very hungry for.
Further Red Flags
Some noted possible inconsistencies between Dr, Tennari’s various accounts – mostly to be expanded on later – there may be others I forgot.
Fumes Off Victims Clothes?
From NYT report on UN session, April 16:
… Even treating the patients was harmful. Dr. Tennari said his eyes itched, and he felt nauseated. One of the nurses fainted from the chlorine fumes off the injured.” (NYT)
First, No one is seen fainting in the videos. Next, it’s unlikely chlorine gas will drift or even rub back off a patient’s skin or clothing enough to do anything, in the war Sarin easily could. It changes to hydrochloric acid on contact with water (so eyes, airways, maybe skin), so surface particles could irritate, even float up into one’s eyes, maybe, off the clothes of a freshly exposed victim. But from what I’ve read, passing out would come only after severe exposure to an air-borne cloud of the stuff, after coughing violently for a while.
Human Rights Watch April 14 report, using a different name spelling, “Tirani”:
Mohamed Ghaleb Tirani, the director of the field hospital in Sarmin who treated many of those affected by the attacks, told Human Rights Watch that the patients’ clothes smelled strongly of chlorine – “like the detergent.” … Tirani said that four of the paramedics at the hospital were affected by second-hand exposure, including burning eyes and shortness of breath and dizziness.
The problem with this, as anyone who’s reviewed the videos or who was there should know, is the children at least had been stripped and washed before arriving in the clinic, as anyone can see looking at the videos he presented. Most other victims, if not all, seem to be similarly stripped (usually to underwear) and washed with water out in the street, then given a civil defense blanket and taken inside. It’s true grandmother Ayosh is not processed, and seemingly remains in her clothes, but she’s also wrapped in a blanket that would greatly mute any vapors – only her face and one arm are exposed.
Dr. Tennari should probably know what makes basic sense, and even if he wasn’t there himself, he should have seen the videos and thought it out before the UN session. But what he says about “fumes” rising off clothes causing symptoms that secondary chlorine exposure would not cause makes very little scientific sense.
Later, just ahead of the June 17 congressional hearing, the Guardian reported a different story, or an unknown twist in the same one. Given a copy of his planned testimony (apparently the same one released by the House as a PDF “transcript”):
As he left his house to head to the hospital, he could smell bleach. “When I arrived at the hospital, a wave of people had already begun to arrive. They were all experiencing symptoms of exposure to a choking agent like chlorine gas. Everyone was decontaminated with water before coming into the hospital, and their clothes were taken off of them.
This now is clearer in matching what the video shows, as if he had watched it. But he insists he was affected anyway, and still blames the children – just not their clothes. In the full testimony (transcript) he says “As I worked, my chest became tighter and tighter, my throat burned, and I had a hard time breathing. The young nurse who took care of baby Mohammed had symptoms of a critical level.”
Perhaps it’s this tenacity in holding to his first story regardless of the holes in it that’s got so many influential people willing to believe everything he says.
Friend of the family?
(to be expanded) Dr. Tennari says the father of the killed family, Waref al-Taleb, was a friend of his. “Their father was a friend of his, he said, and ran an electronics repair shop in town.” or “He ran an electronics repair shop in town, and recently helped to fix my phone.” Our research (not conclusive but worth noting) …
Talebs Gassed Through a Vent?
(to be expanded) app. changing story of the attack details – gas seeped in the vent, or now the barrel crashed down through a ventilation shaft – that could be a simple mix-up based on what he heard, or a red flag.
Children’s Symptoms
(to be expanded)
Foaming at the mouth: false.
Pale sickly color: true
difficulty breathing/suffocating: sort of true
No Beds for Grandma
(to be expanded)