Summary: The State Department is telling American citizens to leave Syria as soon as they can and ordered some personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to depart the country, as the Syrian government steps up a brutal crackdown against pro-reform demonstrators. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on April 25, 2010, Aubrey Immelman suggested that reports of Afghan schoolgirls “knocked unconscious” or made ill by suspected Taliban poison gas attacks on their schools should be investigated as possible cases of mass hysteria (mass psychogenic illness).