Fire Falls Like Rain In Syria

It started with a baby. Within minutes, dozens of teenagers and children staggered into an emergency room on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria. Rola Hallam, a British Syrian doctor, describes what she saw there in late August. "We had had, you know, over 30 who had arrived, all within about 10 or 15 minutes, all with just heartbreaking, extensive burns," she said. The patients were victims of an August 26 attack in Awram al-Koubra, outside Aleppo, where eyewitnesses described incendiary like devices being dropped from a government fighter jet onto a private residence, and then a school. Incendiary bombs are not chemical weapons, but their effects can be just as devastating. Syria: Chemical weapons team faces many dangers, says U.N. chief Ban They are identified as "any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat, or combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target," according to the United Nations. British emergency doctor Saleyha Ahsan describes them in less clinical terms, in the terms of her patients. "The descriptions were fire falling like rain, just falling like rain, plumes of flames and then balls of flames falling out of the sky," she said.