SYRIA - Targeting Doctors

Assad War Criminal

"Repeatedly targeted by airstrikes, Syrian doctors feel abandoned" PBS NewsHour 8/15/2016

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SUMMARY:  In Syria's ongoing war, doctors are under attack in the very places they expect to be safe, their hospitals.  Last week, pro-government forces bombed a maternity hospital in the northwestern city of Idlib -- just one of the more than 375 strikes on medical facilities since the revolution began, according to Physicians for Human Rights.  Special Correspondent Marcia Biggs reports.

MARCIA BIGGS, Special Correspondent:  It is a war crime to target medical facilities, but, in Syria, bombs rain down on hospitals, doctors and patients.

Just in the last few weeks, pro-government forces bombed a maternity hospital in Idlib, supported by 'Save the Children.'  And airstrikes hit six hospitals around Aleppo.  Nurses gathered babies from their incubators, the strike narrowly missing their ward.

Rami Kalazi is no stranger to airstrikes like these.

DR.  RAMI KALAZI, Aleppo Neurosurgeon:  I was sleeping here, and my colleague is here.  And the attack happened.  We came out alive.  I don't know how.

MARCIA BIGGS:  Kalazi was one of Aleppo's last remaining doctors.  We caught up with him in Turkey.  He said he believes these hospitals were targeted.

DR.  RAMI KALAZI:  They are the artery of life in the city.  Can you imagine a life in city without hospitals?  Who will treat your kids?  Who will make the surgeries for the injured people?  So, they are targeting these hospitals because they know, if these hospitals were completely destroyed, the life will be completely destroyed.

MARCIA BIGGS:  Eastern Aleppo had already suffered a massive blow in April, when Al Quds Hospital, supported by 'Doctors Without Borders,' and the city's main pediatric hospital, was destroyed by two consecutive airstrikes.

DR.  RAMI KALAZI:  It was a very hard night.  Every one or two hour, we had an airstrike, and we had to treat some injured people.

MARCIA BIGGS:  Soon he realized the full extent of the damage, more than 50 people dead, including six members of hospital staff.

DR.  RAMI KALAZI:  They were all friends.  So, it was emotionally so hard, because you are treating your friend.  You know how hard is that.  And you see that he is in danger, he may not live, he may not survive.  It was a horrible night.

"In ravaged Aleppo, the fight for survival can begin before birth" PBS NewsHour 8/18/2016

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SUMMARY:  In Aleppo, Syria's largest city and a stronghold of the Islamic State, warfare usually means an end to life, not its beginning.  Recently, a woman nearing labor and walking to the hospital was seriously injured in a bombing.  But after an emergency cesarean section and a long struggle to help the infant breathe, a cry was heard.  Filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab documents this dual fight for life.