Syrian Medical Facilities Were Attacked More Than 250 Days This Year

The rate of assaults doubled after Russia’s military intervention in the conflict in September 2015, the medical society’s figures demonstrate. And virtually 200 resulted after May 3, when the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution strongly condemning violence against those providing and receiving medical treatment in the country.

In July alone, the U.N. recorded 44 attacks on Syrian hospitals a rate of one every 17 hours including 15 in eastern Aleppo. Not a single medical facility in the formerly besieged region of the city has gone unscathed.

Two of Aleppo’s largest hospitals were bombed out of operation on the same day in September. When a reporter asked Syria’s ambassador to the U.N. Bashar Jaadari at a press event if his government had launched those deadly attacks, he simply giggled and walked away. In fact, Damascus and Moscow are systematically denied that hospitals are being targeted.

That’s hard to believe.

From the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through July 2016, Physicians For Human Rights tracked 400 onslaughts against at least 269 separate medical centers in Syria, killing 768 health care workers. The humanitarian group acknowledges that its method of corroboration often leads to significant undercounting, necessitating rigorous review of each reported incident and at least three independent sources to add an assault to its list.

“There are far more attacks than we’re be permitted to document, ” PHR research coordinator Elise Baker told The WorldPost. Even so, more than 90 percent of the documented assaults and demises came at the hands of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and its allied forces including the two assaults that Jaadari scoffed at.

The U.N. holds an even higher counting. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon strongly denounced more than 600 “horrific attacks” on Syrian hospitals and clinics In 2014 and 2015 alone, resulting in 959 demises and more than 1,500 injuries.

Health care structures in Aleppo have fallen victim to a particularly devastating number of assaults. In October, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien called the city’s health care system “all but obliterated, ” with medical facilities “being hit one by one.” By mid-November, there were no more functioning hospitals left to demolish there. Days of intense airstrikes forced every last one out of service, leaving some 275, 000 people without access to health care.

“When you have that population also subject to hundreds of airstrikes, that leads to a rate of demise we can’t even begin to imagine, ” Baker said.

One of Aleppo’s main trauma centers was completely destroyed after it was hit four times in less than three weeks earlier this year. The SAMS-supported hospital had already endured at the least seven earlier attacks between 2014 and 2015, according to PHR. Syrian and Russian warplanes were responsible for all of them.

“We’ve noticed a pattern of attacks targeting the same hospital multiple times, ” Dr. Ahmad Tarakji, president of SAMS, told The WorldPost. “We’ve also “ve noticed that” attacks on facilities are not just individual attacks airstrikes will hit many facilities at the same time in the same region to paralyze the medical reply in that area, which will increase the casualties and demise because of inability to treat even mid-level injuries.”

SAMS operates more than 100 medical centers offering specialized and general health care treatment in Syria. In early December, the organization announced its staff had been driven out of Aleppo after all its facilities in the city were confiscated by the Syrian government.

“With the targeting and demolition of ambulances, it’s built it incredibly difficult for first responders to even get to people and bring them to medical facilities, ” Cone told. Some Syrian hospitals, he told, are operating underground and in caves as a means of shelter and protection from aerial bombardment. “There’s really no line that hasn’t been intersected in this war.”

Experts anticipate health care problems resulting from the war will far outlast the conflict itself. “There are growing longterm issues that we will see for decades to come, ” said Baker, who stressed the urgency of civilians’ various medical needs that have long been neglected. “Kids aren’t get vaccinations, people have gotten amputations without appropriate rehabilitative care … Syria’s entire health systems will need to be rebuilt.”

Children growing up in a war zone are also at a greater hazard of developing psychological disorders, added Tarakji. “In besieged areas of Syria in particular, we have seen increased incidences of violence and depression signs of sickness that won’t be easily treated, and will last for many generations to go, ” he said. “Some of these children witnessed their parents and siblings succumbing, being raped or burned right in front of them.”

Some of the hospitals that have been damaged by regime airstrikes are government-operated facilities, Baker points out. “Of course the government knows where they are, because it established them, ” she said. The activist asserts many assaults on hospitals have “absolutely” been deliberate, initially as a means to “demoralize members of the opposition” and “bomb them into submission.”

But Assad continues to deny Syrian and Russian accountability. After the U.S. government accused the regimes of deadly airstrikes against a Red Crescent assistance escort delivering medical assistance in rural Aleppo, Assad called the White House’s claims “just lies.”

“I would say whatever the American officials said about the conflicts in Syria in general has no credibility, ” he said in an interview with The Associated Press days after the assault, calling it a ground assault by rebels.

Eyewitnesses, including relatives, described helicopters, barrel bombs and at the least 20 rockets, AP’s Ian Phillips pushed back , noting only the Syrians and the Russians have helicopters.

“You cannot talk about eyewitness for such judgment or accusation. What are the credibility of those eyewitnesses, who are they? We don’t know, ” Assad responded.