Barrel bombs filled with poisonous chlorine gas landed on the village of Kafr Zita at 10.30 pm, when most inhabitants had gone to bed.<\/p>\n
The attack on this village in the northern Syria was the fifth in just a week and just one of thousands of attacks on civilians during the eight-year Syrian civil war.<\/p>\n
At least 35 residents were wounded or killed by the poisonous gas, according an investigation conducted by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW.<\/p>\n
Several residents used their mobile phones to film how victims were brought to the two small hospitals of Kafr Zita, and show how doctors and volunteers desperately tried to save lives by washing their faces with water and giving victims oxygen.<\/p>\n
The videos were uploaded to YouTube and other social media in an attempt to draw international attention and prove that war crimes were being committed by in this case president Assads regime. <\/p>\n
But today several of the most important videos have disappeared, deleted by robots that automatically remove posts with inappropriate content.<\/p>\n
Dying children on a hospital floor in Kafr Zita apparently belong to this category, notes Hadi al-Khatib, head of the NGO \u2018Syrian Archive\u2019, that collects and preserves evidence of war crimes and abuse civil war-torn countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan.<\/p>\n
“It’s a huge problem,” he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery minute, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are trawling their platforms, removing material that one day might be crucial to convict war criminals, and there\u2019s nothing we can do about it. We can just try to save as much evidence as possible before it disappears,\u201d Hadi Al-Khatib says.<\/p>\n
The material collected by Syrian Archive are often used by media, human rights organizations and in court cases dealing with war crimes.<\/p>\n
Lost evidence<\/p>\n
The videos are all from the village of Kafr Zita in northern Syria, which was attacked was attacked with barrel bombs containing chlorine gas on 18 April 2014. The chemical attack was later confirmed by an fact finding commission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW. The attack was the fifth in a series of chlorine gas attacks on the city.<\/p>\n
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