Aleppo's angel: A nurse's devotion to Syria's children

[Sally]

You have to give these Syrian medical personnel so much credit for trying to help people in need.


Aleppo's angel: A nurse's devotion to Syria's children


by Nadia Kounang, CNN, and Anna Perczak, Special to CNN

Updated 7:26 PM ET, Sat August 13, 2016

Story highlights

• According to doctors, there is an attack on medical facilities every 17 hours in Syria
• There are just 35 doctors left in the entire city of Aleppo

(CNN)Malaika, a 29-year-old head nurse, holds Ali, a 2-day-old infant, as he struggles to take his final breaths. Born in eastern Aleppo, one of the hardest-hit cities in Syria's five-year civil war, Ali was born with chest issues that forced him to rely on an oxygen pump and an incubator in the neonatal unit at Aleppo Children's Hospital. The hospital is supported by the Independent Doctors Association, a Syrian NGO providing medical services in Aleppo.

At 1:20 p.m.on July 23, a government airstrike scored a direct hit to the hospital. Dust and debris filled the room where 11 babies lay in incubators.


'White Helmets' bring civilian aid to Syria's conflict
Several hours later, early July 24, a second airstrike hit. Staff members scrambled to save the infants and rushed them to a safer location in the basement, but Ali -- already weak -- lost his oxygen supply. Malaika and a doctor tried to perform manual CPR on Ali's fragile body but knew there was nothing they could do. Malaika held him as he died, struggling to breathe.
'It was intentional. It was a war crime.'

Continue reading at:

Aleppo's angel: A nurse's devotion to Aleppo's children - CNN.com

 

[waltky]

Children suffer horrors of Syria's war...

Aleppo's children and families suffer conflict's horror
Fri, 16 Sep 2016 - How can you even imagine Syria's 400,000 dead? For Jeremy Bowen, the stories of two children in Aleppo brought home the waste of war.

Two children this week made me think very hard about the waste and horror of this war in Syria, of every war. The first was a boy of eight called Hani Jadid. He was lying on a trolley outside Aleppo university hospital. The day was hot and all he was dressed in was a disposable nappy. A tube came out of it leading to a plastic bag to collect his urine. His right arm was gone, amputated above the elbow. The stump had been heavily wrapped in new, cream-coloured bandages, like both his legs. Hani was being sent home to start his new life. He will have to live it without four cousins, who were killed by the shell that maimed him. He groaned with pain and called for his father, who was not there, when he was lifted by a male orderly and carried a few paces to a taxi. An uncle and a cousin who had been sent to pick him up got in and the taxi drove away. Hani had been placed on the back seat and his head was squeezed against the door.

Hani Jadid, photographed outside an Aleppo university hospital​

He was wounded before the ceasefire, in a village under government control about an hour's drive from the centre of Aleppo. But geography, politics and timing cannot have been much on the mind of an eight-year-old whose friends are dead, whose arm is gone, facing an hour's agonising drive. Inside the hospital, watched over by her mother, was Rawda al-Youssef, a seven-year-old girl who looked small for her age. She had been shot in the back, and was sleeping. Her mother, Turkieh, had no idea where the bullet had come from and did not seem to care. But it was lodged in her spine and Rawda was paralysed. Her mother's worries were much more specific, about Rawda's future and how she would look after her. She has five other daughters and two sons, one of whom is handicapped. Her husband is a shepherd. Hani and Rawda are two children whose lives have been changed forever. Their injuries will affect everyone in their close families for years to come. But neither died. In the carnage of war in Syria, they were not even a blip in the statistics.

Without warning

The sheer numbers of dead and wounded in Syria are overwhelming. The UN's Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura estimated in April that 400,000 had been killed. Many more have died since then. People can be forgiven if they find it hard to grasp the horror of the deaths of 400,000 individual human beings. Unless they were suicide bombers, the chances are that those people - they had not yet become "the dead" - did not think when they had seen their last sunrise when they woke up on the final day of life. People rarely do. It is always going to happen to someone else.

Turkieh, the mother of Rawda, talked about how a gunshot and a paralysing wound were the last thing on her mind when they sat down to eat dinner outside their house. The worst of the summer heat has gone, and the evenings are breezy and cool. Rawda, she said, was an energetic and loving seven-year-old. She was chatting to her father when she was shot, sitting next to him. Nothing was wrong, until it happened. "We finished dinner and she sat next to her father. I thought maybe she'd been hit in the back by a pebble. She asked her Dad to carry her indoors. "We took her into the house, took out a torch [only people with generators have power], and we saw the blood coming out of her back. A bullet had hit her in the back without any sound."

'My heart is dead'

 

[Bleipriester]

"(TASS) Militants have executed 26 civilians, including nine teenagers, in Aleppo who asked them to leave their neighborhood, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Sunday, citing eyewitnesses who have managed to leave the city via humanitarian corridors.

"Civilians who left Aleppo’s Sheikh Hader district via the 1st and 6th humanitarian corridors at ten in the morning on Sunday told about execution of 26 local residents, including nine teenagers, on Saturday."

Rebels execute 26 civilians in Aleppo

 

[waltky]

Lil' kids buried under bomb debris...

Aleppo strikes leave children trapped beneath rubble
Sat September 24, 2016 - Around 200 airstrikes have pummeled eastern Aleppo since Friday, volunteer group says; 50 people reportedly buried under rubble in Aleppo

Bloodied toddlers wail on a hospital bed. Rescuers pull a baby from rubble, unsure whether the child will survive. The latest videos from rebel-held eastern Aleppo purportedly show scenes from a nightmare that a joint US-Russian peace plan was supposed to resolve. Instead, there's been more violence in Syria as diplomacy seems to have failed once again. Air raids are worse than before the ceasefire went into effect, the opposition says. Activists say the wounded children in footage from the besieged city were hit by airstrikes as the Syrian government announced a new offensive in the area.

Rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in the al-Sakhour neighborhood.​

Airstrikes

About 200 airstrikes have pummeled neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo since Friday morning, said Ammar al-Selmo, the head of the Syria Civil Defense group, a volunteer emergency medical service. Rescue teams are still working to extract people from beneath the rubble, he said. Al-Selmo estimated that more than 100 people had been killed and hundreds more injured within Aleppo neighborhoods by the airstrikes. This figure does not include neighborhoods in the countryside. CNN could not immediately confirm the death toll. During a rescue operation overnight Friday to Saturday, at least five members of the Syria Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, were injured by a nearby airstrike, al-Selmo said. One of those hurt is in critical condition.

Trapped under rubble

An activist with the opposition-aligned Aleppo Media Center, Mujahed Abu Aljood, told CNN on Friday that more than 60 airstrikes had rained down that day. He said the center believed more than 50 people, including children, were trapped underneath rubble in different areas of Aleppo. "Civil defense crews are incapable of extracting them from underneath the rubble due to the intense airstrikes on the city of Aleppo," he said. "Since midnight until now, there are eight dead people and 10 injured as a result of the air strikes." The AMC cited Syria Civil Defense as saying that Russian jets were involved in an airstrike north of Aleppo; CNN has reached out to Russian authorities for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

Trading blame

 

[Bleipriester]

More sickening torture by "rebels"...

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Syria's 'moderate rebels' brutally torture Syrian soldier

 

[Sally]

More sickening torture by "rebels"...

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Syria's 'moderate rebels' brutally torture Syrian soldier

What you need is a month in one of your boyfriend's prisons in Syria where you can listen to the sounds of the prisoners screaming from being tortured. They didn't hang up those pictures of those tortured prisoners for nothing. I am sure the viewers walking in the halls of the U.N. were shocked.

 

[Bleipriester]

More sickening torture by "rebels"...

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Syria's 'moderate rebels' brutally torture Syrian soldier

What you need is a month in one of your boyfriend's prisons in Syria where you can listen to the sounds of the prisoners screaming from being tortured. They didn't hang up those pictures of those tortured prisoners for nothing. I am sure the viewers walking in the halls of the U.N. were shocked.

Bullshit they show there. Bullshit of unknown origin, whereas your "rebels" proudly present their crimes.
Bullshit - I mean if it linked to the Syrian government why don´t you intervene?

 

[Sally]

More sickening torture by "rebels"...

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Syria's 'moderate rebels' brutally torture Syrian soldier

What you need is a month in one of your boyfriend's prisons in Syria where you can listen to the sounds of the prisoners screaming from being tortured. They didn't hang up those pictures of those tortured prisoners for nothing. I am sure the viewers walking in the halls of the U.N. were shocked.

Bullshit they show there. Bullshit of unknown origin, whereas your "rebels" proudly present their crimes.
Bullshit - I mean if it linked to the Syrian government why don´t you intervene?

Everything is bullshit to you when you don't like it. Now go to sleep. Haven't you had enough time day in and day out play at being Baghdad Bob Jr.?

 

[waltky]

MFS faces critical shortage of medics, fuel in Aleppo...

Doctors Without Borders says it faces critical shortage of medics, fuel in Aleppo
Oct. 10, 2016 - Of the 35 MSF medics that remain in Aleppo, only seven can perform surgery, Doctors Without Borders said Monday.

Doctors with the international humanitarian agency Médecins Sans Frontières who were forced to flee the contested city of Aleppo now want to go back and treat scores of victims wounded by the ongoing fighting in the north Syrian city, the organization said Monday. Less than three dozen members of MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, remain in eastern Aleppo while almost 100 new patients have arrived at the few functioning hospitals remaining there in the last three days, officials said in a news release Monday.

Only seven of those medics have the ability to perform surgery on wounded patients. "There is no time to waste. Russia and Syria must stop the indiscriminate bombing now and abide by the rules of war to avoid the extreme suffering of the unprotected civilian population," Pablo Marco, MSF's operations manager in the Middle East, said.

The organization is appealing to the Syrian government and other world leaders to help establish a safe passage into Aleppo for medics -- similar to what was supposed to happen for relief supplies with the recently-abandoned cease-fire brokered by Russia and the United States. "[Doctors] observe now with deep sorrow the deterioration of the crisis, unable to help a population in dire need," MSF Syria mission leader Carlos Francisco said. "As far as we know, several doctors have expressed their willingness to go back as soon as possible if a humanitarian corridor is created."

Some of the doctors stationed in Aleppo, one of Syria's most contested and battle-scarred cities, were forced to flee north to Turkey in July when offensives by Syrian and allied forces took them by surprise. "Wounded patients are sleeping in front of hospitals during heavy bombings because the hallways of the hospitals are full," Ahmed Laila, head of east Aleppo's Directorate of Health, said.

Between Thursday and Saturday, 98 new patients checked into hospitals in east Aleppo -- 11 of them children -- and 29 were killed by airstrikes. In addition to personnel, MSF said it is also facing a critical shortage of fuel to power the hospitals and their fleet of ambulances. Marco said the clinics are on the verge of losing electricity, which would greatly reduce their ability to perform lifesaving services. MSF said it supports eight hospitals in east Aleppo and runs six other facilities in northern Syria.

Doctors Without Borders says it faces critical shortage of medics, fuel in Aleppo

 

[Bleipriester]

Don´t worry, monkey. The war in Aleppo will be over soon. Isn´t that good news? No? Oh, you mean the war may only be over when al-Qaeda wins? So you get no bananas today, fucking monkey.

 

[Bleipriester]

That monkey is way too busy to post an angry smiley when the Saudi regime massacres Yemenis.

US State Dept defends Saudi massacre of Yemeni civilians

 

[Sally]

Don´t worry, monkey. The war in Aleppo will be over soon. Isn´t that good news? No? Oh, you mean the war may only be over when al-Qaeda wins? So you get no bananas today, fucking monkey.

Does anyone believe that this nut is sane? He really should b e locked up in a zoo with the chimps and he can have all the bananas he wants.