“They’ve seen terrible things: bombings, shooting, people screaming…Their lives were turned upside down.”
Excellent reporting on the tragic situation facing Syria’s children, from NBC.
Save the Children has issued a report on the status of health care in Syria, titled “A devastating toll: the impact of three years of war on the health of Syria’s children.” The report exposes a broken health system and its consequences: children not just dying from violent means but from diseases that would previously either have been treatable or prevented.
An excellent video, from the New York Times website, titled “Syria’s Wounded Generation,” shows a medical after-care center near Turkey’s border with Syria, where civilians and combatants recover from life-altering injuries. The Times’s Mac William Bishop spoke to casualties of Syria’s brutal war.
According to a group of more than 50 medical professionals, writing in the medical journal, The Lancet, Syria’s medical system is at a “breaking point” after years of targeted assaults.
According to the letter:
Systematic assaults on medical professionals, facilities, and patients are breaking Syria’s health care system and making it nearly impossible for civilians to receive essential medical services. The targeted attacks on medical facilities and personnel are deliberate and systematic, not an inevitable nor acceptable consequence of armed conflict. Such attacks are an unconscionable betrayal of the principle of medical neutrality.
Read the letter here, and see an overview article at the Huffington Post.
Meet Dr. Abdalmajid Katranji, a Syrian-American surgeon who is providing medical care to victims of the Syrian conflict.
CBS News in the US has this television news story about Dr. Katranji.
Mehmet Zeki Çulcu, founder of Reha Protez & Ortez / Prosthetics and Orthotics Center, Istanbul, Turkey
MercyCorps has put together an excellent overview of the key facts about the Syrian refugee crisis.
A must read!
“With hopes for comprehensive peace talks in the immediate future nearly quashed, groups monitoring the ongoing crisis in Syria say more attention needs to be paid to the intractable dilemma of delivering humanitarian aid to the country.
More than nine million people currently require immediate assistance in Syria, the United Nations said recently, many of them suffering from a lack of food, water, and basic medical supplies as winter edges closer.
But aid workers cannot reach them, monitors say, largely because the Syrian government has restricted access…”
Read the full article in The Huffington Post.
A number of doctors are signatories to this powerful letter, published in the medical Journal Lancet, asking to be able to treat patients in Syria, without fear or interference.
For an in-depth understanding of the state of the humanitarian crisis — in this case, in the Syrian city of Aleppo, you can read this detailed Joint Rapid Assessment of Northern Syria – Aleppo City Assessment (PDF).
Palmyra Relief 