Diary of an Aleppo Doctor: 'The Child in Front of Me Could Be My Daughter'

[Sally]

How difficult it has to be for these doctors.

Diary of an Aleppo Doctor: 'The Child in Front of Me Could Be My Daughter'
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iStock/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- Hamza Khatib is one of about 29 doctors left in the besieged part of east Aleppo, Syria. He works at one of only five hospitals that remain in service in the war-torn eastern part of the city, home to an estimated 275,000 people desperately in need of clean water, food and medical supplies.

On a normal day, his hospital receives about 50 people who have been injured by airstrikes, shootings or other types of attacks. When airstrikes hit near the hospital, they treat about 100 people.

“We see everything from the simplest wounds to people losing limbs,” Khatib, who is using a pseudonym for safety reasons, told ABC News in Arabic.

Khatib spends most of his days and nights at the hospital with his wife and 9-month-old daughter. From March 2011 until the end of June this year, Syria saw 382 attacks on 269 separate medical facilities, while 757 medical personnel were killed, according to Physicians for Human Rights. Since then, attacks on medical clinics in the country have been so frequent that PHR is still working on documenting them.

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Diary of an Aleppo Doctor: 'The Child in Front of Me Could Be My Daughter' - World News - ABC News Radio?

 

[waltky]

No assurances from warring factions on safety of evacuations...

Medical Evacuations from Aleppo Fail to Materialize
Oct 21, 2016 — The Syrian government on Friday opened a new corridor for rebels and civilians who want to leave the besieged eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo, but the U.N. said planned medical evacuations haven't begun as planned because of a lack of security assurances from the warring sides.

The evacuations, part of a Russia-announced pause in fighting, were announced a day earlier with great hopes by U.N. officials. But the spokesman for the U.N's humanitarian aid agency, Jens Laerke, described an "astronomically difficult situation," although he declined to specify who was responsible for the breakdown in the plans on Friday. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Laerke said that the evacuations couldn't begin "because the necessary conditions were not in place to ensure safe, secure and voluntary" movement of people. A U.N. official, however, told The Associated Press that Syrian opposition fighters were blocking medical evacuations because the government and Russia were impeding deliveries of medical and humanitarian supplies into the city.

Rescue workers try to remove a boy stuck in the debris of a building in the neighborhood of Qaterji in east Aleppo following an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria​

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the United Nations was expected to make an official statement about the hold-up in medical evacuations later on Friday, said intense efforts were under way in Damascus, Aleppo, Geneva and Gaziantep, Turkey, to try to move forward on the evacuations. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said al-Qaida-linked militants in Aleppo were refusing to leave the city along the corridors created by the Russians and Syrian forces. He told reporters in Moscow that Russia is "seriously concerned that, despite the gestures of goodwill from Moscow and Damascus," the fighters from the al-Qaida affiliate previously known as the Nusra Front are "refusing to leave the city." Aleppo's civilians are also being prevented from leaving the eastern, rebel-held part of the city through the corridors, Lavrov added.

The pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV aired live footage from the Castello Road showing bulldozers that had opened the road. Buses and ambulances were parked by the roadside, waiting to take evacuees. But residents in eastern Aleppo have said many won't take advantage of the corridors because there are no guarantees that the evacuees won't be arrested by government forces. By midday Friday, no evacuations were seen along the Aleppo corridor. "No one has left the city so far," said Mohammed Abu Rajab, who works at an eastern Aleppo hospital that was repeatedly hit over the past weeks, knocking it out of service. "People are worried they might be detained. There are no guarantees."

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[B. Kidd]

It's in the interest by anti-Assad rebels to keep civilians trapped in Aleppo for western propaganda purposes. Even a dum chimp like you should be able to see 'dat!