Syria Today | Caught Giving Aid

The violence afflicting the country has produced two camps of injured people, each with a very different story to tell.

By Muhammad Atef Fares
Photo Carole al-Farah

The sensitivity of this situation was obvious on January 14, eight days after a suicide bombing in nearby Midan, when armour-clad police officers with Kalashnikovs slung from their shoulders were occupying the main lobby of state-run Damascus Hospital, barring the entrance to the director’s office. To one side, a bunch of journalists were waiting.

Syria Today’s reporter was supposed to have an interview with injured protestors receiving healthcare at the hospital. “It is not a suitable time for an interview,” the hospital director Adib Mahmoud said quietly as he passed by followed by three members of the Arab League (AL) observer mission.

After the journalists waited for about an hour, a young doctor emerged from Mahmoud’s office. “The meeting [with the AL observers] will take a long time,” he told everyone. When asked by Syria Today’s reporter if the observers were visiting injured people, the doctor replied: “We do not have any today.”

This anomalous scene – a public hospital occupied by armoured men, but with no injured patients to be seen – indicates how Syria’s healthcare system has been strained by the crisis. This in turn has affected how medical facilities are used and, some claim, abused.

Targeting healthcare
On January 19, Minister of Health Wael al-Halaqi declared that terrorist attacks had martyred 12 medical staff, including doctors and nurses, injured 25 staff members, and damaged 12 hospitals, 43 health centres, and 76 ambulances, state-run news agency SANA reported.

On November 23, privately-owned Syria Steps news website reported that several doctors and nurses were threatened because they treat army and security members. It also stated that private hospital Al-Horani in Hama had been turned into a “storehouse for weapons...and a [source] of funding to kill army and security members,” while Al-Bir Hospital in Homs had become a “permanent nest for treating armed men”. In addition, it reported that in Homs, Al-Hikma, a private hospital owned by the sister of opposition Syrian National Council head Burhan Ghalioun, had become “a prison for abducted honest sons of Homs and the mutilation of corpses”.

Western and AL sanctions supposedly targeting the Syrian regime have also harmed the health sector. Recently, Mahmoud explained, because of the devaluation of the Syrian currency, “the number of people applying for our bids [to buy medical materials] is minor if not zero.” He added that while hospital supplies were adequate in the short term, he expects increasing shortages in the future as purchasing becomes more difficult.

No neutral field?
Economic hardships are not the only threats affecting the Syrian healthcare system. Many activists and opposition figures say the field is polarised, and harms rather than heals patients who are deemed anti-government. By law, all hospitals are required to report any patients who have sustained firearm or other serious injuries to the police. Anwar al-Bounni, a prominent human rights lawyer, told Syria Today that because they are afraid of being arrested or killed, many people injured in protests avoid hospitals, especially public ones.

Amnesty International (AI), a global human rights organisation, issued a report on October 23 stating that “the Syrian authorities have turned hospitals and medical staff into instruments of repression in the course of their efforts to crush the demonstrations.”

However, Mahmoud said that demonstrators’ fears are unfounded, and that Syrian hospitals provide healthcare to all, regardless of how or where a patient was wounded. He pointed out that on January 6, the hospital received both security members wounded in the Midan explosion and protestors injured in nearby demonstrations, and that both groups received equal healthcare.

Mahmoud argued that allegations such as those published by AI “are part of the conspiracy [targeting Syria].

Mahmoud also denied security forces’ or any other organisation’s interruption of hospital work. “We are a neutral body,” he said. “Our mission is to provide healthcare services. Other official bodies are responsible for checking and holding the guilty accountable.”

Nevertheless, activists say that because of fear, many wounded protestors are turning to field clinics set up by some local communities.

“They would detain me if I went to the hospital,” a teenaged protestor told CNN on December 11. The protestor, whose back was cut when security forces dragged him over broken glass, found treatment through an underground network of clinics called Doctors’ Coordination (DC).

These networks organise medical professionals who supply instruments, equipment and medicines, or provide healthcare on the ground. Some operate private clinics hidden in neighbourhoods where demonstrations take place, constantly changing their locations.

Such clinics are illegal and, Bounni points out, “the police never feel ashamed declaring they broke into a field clinic.” On October 13, for example, privately-owned daily Al-Watan reported that authorities had seized a field hospital in Homs.

Bounni added that “many doctors were arrested because they treat protestors and they were never transferred to court.” Thus, for their own safety, such doctors do not identify themselves.

However, their work still entails grave risks, as in the case of DC’s founder Ibrahim Othman. On December 10, the 26-year-old doctor was reportedly shot dead while trying to flee to Turkey, opposition sources said.

Two other groups operating in Syria are the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). They work in partnership with the government, which says they are operating freely to provide medical aid in hot areas.

Despite these groups’ claim of neutrality, opposition groups say doctors and health workers, including SARC staff and facilities, are being targeted by governmental forces who “obstructed ambulances on their way to pick up wounded people and when ferrying the wounded to hospitals,” AI reported last October.

SARC’s staff and volunteers regularly risk their lives working in restive areas. On January 25, Abdel Razaq Jbeiro, SARC’s secretary-general for Syria and the head of its operations in Idlib, was killed by unknown gunmen while driving a car “clearly marked” with the organisation’s emblem, SARC said in a statement. First-responder and SARC volunteer Hakam Sibai, 25, was also killed and two others were injured after being shot in Homs on September 7.

According to Saleh Dabbakeh, the ICRC spokesperson in Syria, understanding the principle of neutrality has proved to be a challenge both for humanitarian organisations and the communities they assist. “For humanitarians, promoting neutrality and explaining what it means is not easy,” Dabbakeh said. “In the beginning, many people did not understand the concept of neutrality, that SARC volunteers do not take sides and that SARC is neutral, independent and impartial,” he explained. “But once volunteers started talking to people, they understood and accepted [volunteers] and the fact that their neutrality meant providing assistance to anyone who needs assistance without discrimination.”

Firas Hennawi, a 25-year-old SARC volunteer for greater Damascus since 2007, commented: “I want to serve my homeland through providing healthcare to the ones who need it. I would decrease my ability to provide health assistance if I expressed my political opinion as a [Syrian] citizen.” He added that “differences in [political] opinions do exist in SARC and this is normal. But SARC’s mission has nothing to do with that.”