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.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
– J.W. Goethe
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.
We are not sure about the origin or photo credit for this heartbreaking photo, but it’s going around on the Syrian-related sites.
There really are no words…
“The world must act to save a generation of traumatized, isolated and suffering children from catastrophe. If we do not move quickly, this generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of war.” — UN
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).
Dr. Saleyha Ahsan, a physician who works in the UK, describes her January 2013 trip to the Turkish border to help support emergency medical treatment for Syrians in this article from the medical journal, The Lancet.
Read: Providing medical relief in Syria’s conflict.
There is also a 7 November 2013 article from Dr. Ahsan, featured at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, talking about her return trip to Syria in August of 2013.
Palmyra Relief 