GENEVA (Sputnik) — The rally, attended by some 150 protesters, was timed to the beginning of a new round of Syrian proximity talks in the Swiss city.
"We gathered here today to show solidarity with the Kurdish people who are suffering from chemical attacks in Aleppo and two its neighborhoods, including Sheikh Maqsoud for already several weeks," Ramazan Tutar, one of the protest's organizers and member of the Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) told Sputnik.
Tutar accused militants from Jaysh al-Islam of launching chemical attacks on Aleppo that killed 23 Kurds. The rebel group’s leader is a chief negotiator at the Geneva talks representing the Riyadh-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC), a Syrian key opposition group.
Syrian Kurds have again been denied an invitation to the peace process and will not be sending delegates, despite calls from Russia and one of the Syrian opposition groups not to repeat this mistake.
"These people are present here for the political discussion. But Kurds themselves are not present," Tutar pointed out.
Asked where militants could get chemical weapons, Tutar said that "militants in Aleppo have a facility for producing chemical weapons, including hand-made bombs with sarin gas… Gas was delivered to the Syrian territory from the Turkish town Adana."
Last Thursday, a spokesman for Syrian Kurds told Sputnik that gas poisoning cases had been reported among the civilian population and Kurdish militias after an attack on Aleppo by Islamic militants. Jaysh al-Islam took responsibility for the shelling, saying it had used "forbidden" weapons.
