Five French charity staff are killed in airstrike on Aleppo clinic

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These medical personnel put their lives on the line the same as the reporters attempting to get out the news and the White Helmets trying to rescue people.


Five French charity staff are killed in airstrike on Aleppo clinic
Con Coughlin

PUBLISHED22/09/2016 | 02:30

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Syrian men rescue a baby from the rubble of a destroyed building following a reported air strike in the Qatarji neighbourhood of the northern city of Aleppo yesterday. Photo: Getty
At least five staff from a French medical charity have been killed after their clinic in northern Syria was hit by an airstrike, the latest in an eruption of violence since the breakdown of a week-long truce brokered by the US and Russia.

• The Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations, known by the French acronym UOSSM, said three nurses and two ambulances drivers were killed when their medical facility was bombed outside Aleppo.

"This is a deplorable act against healthcare workers and medical facilities," said Dr Khaula Sawah, the head of UOSSM USA.

The strike is believed to have been carried out by either Russia or the Syrian regime.

The deaths came after senior coalition officials said Russia was directly involved in the bombing of a UN aid convoy on the outskirts of Aleppo on Monday in a "revenge" attack for an earlier air strike that killed 60 Syrian soldiers.

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Five French charity staff are killed in airstrike on Aleppo clinic - Independent.ie?

 

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Aleppo without access to running water...

2 million Syrians without water after airstrikes
Sept. 24, 2016 -- "Intense attacks" in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo has left nearly 2 million residents without access to running water, UNICEF said.

Airstrikes on Friday damaged a pumping station that supplies water to the eastern parts of the city. In retaliation for the attack, another pumping station was intentionally shut off, cutting off the water supply to 1.5 million people in western Aleppo.

A Syrian man looks at the burning and damaged trucks, which were carrying aid to the city of Aleppo, after air strikes destroyed 18 trucks in a 31-truck aid convoy in the town of Orum al-Kubra on the western outskirts of Aleppo on September 20, 2016. The Red Cross said on Tuesday at least 20 people were killed in the attack on the trucks carrying desperately needed humanitarian relief to thousands of Syrians.​

Hanaa Singer, a UNICEF representative in Syria, said the lack of water is the latest in a series of atrocities the children of Aleppo have faced during the conflict. "Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of waterborne diseases and adds to the suffering, fear and horror that children in Aleppo live through every day," she said in a statement.

Eastern Aleppo will be forced to rely on "highly contaminated well water." Deep wells in the western part of the city are a safer alternative and Unicef will provide water trucks to all areas, though Singer said it is only "a temporary solution." "It is critical for children's survival that all parties to the conflict stop attacks on water infrastructure," she added.

Burnt and damaged trucks carrying aid are seen after air strikes destroyed 18 trucks in a 31-truck aid convoy in the town of Orum al-Kubra on the western outskirts of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 20, 2016. The Red Cross said on Tuesday at least 20 people were killed in the attack on the trucks carrying desperately needed humanitarian relief to thousands of Syrians.​

A seven-day cease-fire negotiated by the U.S. and Russia fell through on Monday leading to the fresh wave of violence that killed 91 people on Friday and 25 on Saturday as Syrian troops reportedly captured a rebel stronghold north of Aleppo.

2 million Syrians without water after airstrikes

 

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I seriously doubt Assad or the Russians listen...

Halt Aleppo ‘bloodbath,’ MSF tells al-Assad, Russia
Sat, Oct 01, 2016 - Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) yesterday appealed to the Syrian government and its Russian ally to stop bombing rebel-held eastern Aleppo, warning they were provoking a “bloodbath” among civilians in the city.

“Bombs are raining from Syria-led coalition planes and the whole of east Aleppo has become a giant kill box,” MSF director of operations Xisco Villalonga said in a statement. “The Syrian government must stop the indiscriminate bombing, and Russia as an indispensable political and military ally of Syria has the responsibility to exert the pressure to stop this,” he said. The UN has warned that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Aleppo unlike any witnessed so far in Syria’s brutal five-year war, which has claimed more than 300,000 lives. According to the UN, only about 35 doctors remain in eastern Aleppo, where an estimated 250,000 people have been under siege by government forces since early last month.

The MSF statement cited numbers from the east Aleppo health directorate, showing that from Sept. 1 to 26, the few hospitals still functioning in the rebel-held part of the city received some 278 dead bodies, including at least 96 children. More than 822 wounded were also taken in, including at least 221 children, the group said. “All intensive care units are full. Patients have to wait for others to die so they can be moved to an available bed in intensive care,” Abu Waseem, manager of an MSF-supported trauma hospital in east Aleppo, said in the statement. “We only have three operating theaters and yesterday alone we had to do more than 20 major abdominal surgeries,” he said, adding that “hospital staff is working up to 20 hours a day. They cannot just go home and let people die.”

A man searches for survivors at a damaged site hit by airstrikes in Idlib, Syria​

MSF said it had last been able to deliver medical supplies to east Aleppo in August, and warned that the huge number of wounded was rapidly depleting the stocks in the remaining hospitals. “Now, with a complete siege on the city, attacks on humanitarian convoys and intensive bombing, we are powerless,” Villalonga said, adding that “if this intensity of bombing continues, there may not be a single hospital standing in a few days.” He demanded that the bombing stop, and that the sick and wounded be evacuated from the city. “Anything short of this is confirmation of what many are dreading, that the world has abandoned the people of Aleppo to a violent, agonizing death,” he said.

In related news, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights yesterday said that more than 3,800 civilians have been killed in one year of Russian airstrikes in Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. More than 9,300 people have been killed in the Russian raids since Sept. 30 last year, the monitoring group said. The toll includes more than 2,700 militants from the Islamic State group and about 2,800 fighters from various rebel factions, the British-based group said. At least 20,000 civilians have been wounded in the Russian raids, it said. The Observatory — which relies on a network of sources inside Syria for its information — says it determines what planes carried out raids according to their type, location, flight patterns and the munitions involved. Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the death toll from Russian strikes could be even higher given the number of people killed by unidentified warplanes.

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Aleppo hospital hit again...

Hospital in Rebel-held Part of Aleppo Is Bombed Again
October 01, 2016 - Relief workers said the largest remaining Syrian hospital in the rebel-held eastern half of the city of Aleppo was bombed Saturday for the second time in recent days, as Syrian government forces and their Russian allies pressed their deadly offensive to recapture the entire city.

A spokesman for the Syrian American Medical Society said the M-10 hospital was hit by at least two barrel bombs as physicians performed emergency medical procedures on a small cluster of patients. Adham Sahloul also told reporters that a small number of medical personnel and patients remained trapped in the wrecked facility, one of two hospitals crippled Wednesday by airstrikes that killed several people.

A damaged field hospital room is seen after airstrikes in a rebel-held area in Aleppo, Syria​

Monitors from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 30 doctors remained to treat 300,000 residents trapped in Aleppo, as government forces pressured the edges of a key neighborhood in the city's north. The monitors Saturday reported the deaths of at least 20 people, including six children, in airstrikes elsewhere in the rebel sector of the city.

'Really unfathomable'

World Health Organization humanitarian spokesman Rick Brennan, speaking Friday, described the situation in Aleppo as "really unfathomable." Brennan said that health officials in the city had recorded 338 bombing deaths "in the last couple of weeks" and that the toll included 106 children. More than 800 people have been wounded, he said. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has denounced the hospital bombings as war crimes, while the United States continues to press Russia for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

People inspect a damaged site after airstrikes on the rebel-held Sheikh Fares neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria​

The Obama administration accuses Russia and Syria of targeting hospitals, refugee camps and other critical sites, including water pumping stations and power plants. U.S. officials say the bombings are indiscriminate and that the Russians make no effort to limit their targets to Islamic State fighters. For its part, Russia insists its forces are targeting terrorists. It also accuses Washington of reneging on a commitment to separate fighters from the al-Qaida-linked extremist group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly the al-Nusra Front) from moderate rebel factions seeking to oust the Damascus government. The U.S. State Department says U.S. warplanes have not recently targeted extremists in the city because of their close proximity to civilians and moderate groups.

U.S. effectiveness questioned

See also:

Russia's Syria Campaign Seen Purely as Bid to Prop Up Assad
September 30, 2016 — The Russian air force's bombing campaign in Syria marked its first anniversary Friday, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying there was no "time frame" for the operation.

The Kremlin has officially declared the main objectives of its air campaign in Syria to be eliminating radical Islamic extremists in Syria and protecting Russia from the spread of international terrorism. However, independent experts and other observers both inside and outside Russia say that Moscow is using any means necessary to keep the regime of Bashar al-Assad in power. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights reported Friday that about 3,800 civilians, almost a quarter of them children, had been killed in Russian airstrikes in Syria since the start of Moscow's air campaign. Kremlin spokesman Peskov dismissed the observatory's casualty estimates as unreliable. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said Russian and Syrian government bombardment of rebel-held eastern Aleppo had killed 338 people, including 106 children, over the past week alone.

'Goal' questioned

In an interview with VOA's Russian service, Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center recalled that at the outset of the air campaign in Syria a year ago, Moscow declared that its goal was "victory over ISIS," an acronym for the Islamic State group. "On June 30, ISIS celebrated the second anniversary of its existence," Malashenko said. "Therefore, the question arises: Who was the operation directed against after all? The answer is obvious: It was an action in support of Bashar al-Assad."

Rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in the al-Sakhour neighborhood of the rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Syria, Sept. 21, 2016. Violence in Aleppo has surged in recent days as a U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire collapsed after one week.​

In Malashenko's view, Russia's military campaign in Syria has achieved almost nothing. "Yes, Bashar has survived," he said, noting that before Russia launched its air campaign in Syria, 50 percent of the personnel in Assad's army had "run off" and 60 percent of its armored vehicles had been destroyed. "What is different now?" he asked. "Imagine for a second that the [Russian] operation were suddenly curtailed. Where would Assad be?"

Malashenko said the Assad regime was "pathologically weak" and "capable of absolutely nothing without the support of Russia," while "Moscow does not know what to do next." "To support Assad eternally is impossible," he said. "There are also no prospects for establishing some kind of post-Assad, pro-Russian lobby in Syria." The situation in Syria looks good only when looked at in Kremlin propaganda reports, Malashenko added. "By the way, if you count as I have, the number of militants who the [Russian] national [TV] channels say have been killed [in Russian airstrikes in Syria], there shouldn't be any left at all," he said. "Then who's fighting?"

No disincentives seen for Russia