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NY Times Op-Ed, June 5, 2019
In Syria, Even the Hospitals Are Not Safe
Bashar al-Assad attacks medical facilities to break the will of the
people — and to destroy evidence of his war crimes.
By Janine di Giovanni
Ms. di Giovanni is the author of “The Morning They Came for Us:
Dispatches From Syria.”
After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the
Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President
Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the
Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical
facility attacked since late April.
Mr. al-Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it
represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare.
Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the
international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities
were spared.
That has changed. Governments increasingly turn on civilians, and
hospitals and medical workers are being deliberately targeted in an
effort to silence them. Doctors are tortured and killed. Health care
workers have been robbed, looted, beaten and murdered in Central African
Republic, Congo, Lebanon and Myanmar.
Nowhere is this more obvious than Syria. In May, Rola Hallam, a
British-trained Syrian anesthetist, crossed the border from Turkey into
Ghandoura, a small town in the northern Aleppo countryside. After
passing through several armed checkpoints, she reached the Hope Hospital
for Children, which she and her colleagues had built in just three
months in 2017.
Hope is the seventh hospital she and her team — an organization called
CanDo — have built since 2016 after six medical facilities in Aleppo,
including a children’s hospital, were destroyed by Russian and Syrian
government planes.
She thought how she had planned the site of the new hospital, trying to
find a place where it was less likely to be attacked. “That’s a question
we should not have to ask,” she told me. “Hospitals should not be bombed.”
But in Syria, hospitals are a tool of war. Dr. Hallam said there have
been 91 attacks since April 2017. This means that hospitals cannot treat
the sick or dying. It means people with chronic illness have no care. No
maternity clinics or diagnostic labs.
The government’s campaign against hospitals goes back to the beginning
of the war, when the protests against the government started. President
al-Assad, an ophthalmologist, believed that doctors who treated bleeding
and battered protesters were themselves anti-government partisans.
Last month, a group of 400 Syrian medics, rescue workers and
humanitarian activists signed a letter calling on the key players in
northwest Syria — Russia, Turkey and members of the United Nations
Security Council — to stop the bombing in the Idlib region, which is
supposed to be a demilitarized zone.
President al-Assad says that the attacks are necessary because
terrorists use hospitals as arms depots (an unfounded claim); he also
says that most of the bombs that do hit hospitals are errant.
But Susannah Sirkin, the policy director of Physicians for Human Rights,
believes that the bombings are systematic, amounting to crimes against
humanity. She says that since 2011, her organization has documented 566
individual attacks on about 350 Syrian health care facilities. More than
890 medical personnel have been killed, some in attacks on the medical
facilities where they worked.
What explains such an extensive and cruel campaign? In President
al-Assad’s mind, somewhere along the line, “opposition” became a synonym
for “civilians,” many of whom don’t support either side but just want to
stay alive. The most threatening way you can terrorize a population is
to bomb hospitals and kill doctors.
And by killing doctors, who are often the community leaders, you can
break down society faster and force surrender quicker. You kill the very
people who can heal a community. “When they kill one doctor, they kill
1,000 civilians,” Dr. Hallam said.
And there is another reason for the attacks.
In an isolated villa on the grounds of the United Nations in Geneva, war
crime investigators are methodically going through thousands of hours of
video recordings of bombings taken by civilians. This evidence will be
used to build cases in war crimes tribunals. By killing doctors, the
Assad regime and its Russian allies destroy further evidence — and
witnesses.
It is the same reasoning behind so-called double-tap bombings, often
deployed by Russian forces in Syria. Many rescue workers record their
work — the famed White Helmets attach cameras to their bodies to
document an attack and their response. As they get to work, though,
another round of bombing begins, aiming to kill the very workers trying
to save the victims of the original attack.
President al-Assad is intent on ending the war by taking the last piece
of Syria to resist his control — Idlib. That is why so many hospitals in
the area have been attacked over the past month.
“It’s a tactic to get people to surrender,” said Dr. Hallam, who tries
to understand the logic of the bombers. “What goes through their minds
as they decide to kill people in a hospital? I think war is so blinding.
I think they dehumanize them so they don’t even see them as human
beings, worthy of a breath.”
Dr. Hallam, who first arrived in Britain as an 11-year-old refugee who
could not speak English, left Syria a few days after visiting Hope
Hospital. For the moment, it is safe.
“Will I see the hospital again?” she said. “Will I see the staff again?”
Nothing and no one is ever safe in Syria, she said. Not even hospitals.
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