Abdul Hamid walks slowly in a black Adidas tracksuit, head bowed, through a dusty graveyard. The cemetery, ringed by the remains of bombed-out buildings, bears silent witness to what unfolded in Syria.
The 36-year-old tradesman stops, murmurs a prayer and begins pulling weeds from the earth around the sun-bleached gravestones. He points to them one by one: “My cousin, my wife Sana, both of my children — the twins — another cousin and his daughter, two more cousins and one of his sons, both of my brothers Yasser and Abdul Karim and their children.”
The list continues, an unrelenting rhythm of grief. Not a mass grave, but a mass death, all felled by a single, silent killer. On April 4, 2017, a sarin-laced rocket dropped from a Syrian air force jet into Khan Shaykhun, a sleepy town 34 miles south of Idlib.
