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12 Hours. 4 Syrian Hospitals Bombed. One Culprit: Russia. https://nyti.ms/2IM8M21

Sadly, this is nothing new. These hospitals were underground specifically because the previously extant hospitals were destroyed in bombings. Hospitals are targeted, according to the Assad regime, because they treat enemy combatants, who then re-deploy. Bombing hospitals and civilians is a war crime. #RussianWarCrimes #AssadWarCrimes

"Russia's military helped save Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Our visual investigation shows that included bombing 4 hospitals in 12 hours. Here’s the evidence — videos, flight logs and Russian Air Force cockpit recordings — that proves what happened." https://t.co/92ozd3yg0P

"This video shows what military experts described as a precision strike on a major trauma center in Syria, Nabad al Hayat. Analysts said it was a strike the Syrian air force is not currently capable of, only the Russians." https://t.co/jEDGY0GNpI

"Here’s how we confirmed the Russians were responsible for the Nabad al Hayat strike: First, witnesses reported that it happened at 2:40 p.m. local time. Second: flight logs. Spotters in the area saw a Russian jet flying overhead, just minutes before the attack." https://t.co/tBNlxO46gG

"We also decoded Russian Air Force communications. Here’s a recording of a Russian pilot confirming coordinates that point directly at the underground Nabad al Hayat hospital."

Minutes later, the pilot confirms the strike, saying "Worked it.” https://t.co/Q0n4tTGx9O

"Nabad al Hayat hospital was empty when the Russians bombed it. But another, Kafr Nabl, was not. Video shows it was bombed 4 times in all, including precision strikes that hit the hospital’s entrance. One person was killed in the attack, with many injured." https://t.co/91PgcWpIHo

"Doctors were treating patients at Syria’s Kafr Nabl hospital when the Russians bombed it. “Everyone in the hospital was terrified,” a doctor said. “There was ash and dust everywhere.”" https://t.co/iBXEm03sNC

"Russia's military support of President Bashar Al Assad was a turning point in the Syrian conflict as superior air power was used against civilian targets. Now, it's clear that hospitals were among those under attack. Watch our full investigation for more:" https://t.co/tx7B8ELedU

12 Hours. 4 Syrian Hospitals Bombed. One Culprit: Russia.

اقرأ باللغة العربية

By Evan Hill and Christiaan Triebert | Published October 13, 2019 Updated 12:10 PM ET| New York Times | Posted October 13, 2019 3:00 PM ET |

The Russian Air Force has repeatedly bombed hospitals in Syria in order to crush the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

An analysis of previously unpublished Russian Air Force radio recordings, plane spotter logs and witness accounts allowed The Times to trace bombings of four hospitals in just 12 hours in May and tie Russian pilots to each one.

The 12-hour period beginning on May 5 represents a small slice of the air war in Syria, but it is a microcosm of Russia’s four-year military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A new front in the conflict opened this week, when Turkish forces crossed the border as part of a campaign against a Kurdish-led militia.

Russia has long been accused of carrying out systematic attacks against hospitals and clinics in rebel-held areas as part of a strategy to help Mr. Assad secure victory in the eight-year-old war.

Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that tracks attacks on medical workers in Syria, has documented at least 583 such attacks since 2011, 266 of them since Russia intervened in September 2015. At least 916 medical workers have been killed since 2011.

The Times assembled a large body of evidence to analyze the hospital bombings on May 5 and 6.

Social media posts from Syria, interviews with witnesses, and records from charities that supported the four hospitals provided the approximate time of each strike. The Times obtained logs kept by flight spotters on the ground who warn civilians about incoming airstrikes and crosschecked the time of each strike to confirm that Russian warplanes were overhead. We then listened to and deciphered thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions, which recorded months’ worth of pilot activities in the skies above northwestern Syria. The recordings were provided to The Times by a network of observers who insisted on anonymity for their safety.

The spotter logs from May 5 and 6 put Russian pilots above each hospital at the time they were struck, and the Air Force audio recordings from that day feature Russian pilots confirming each bombing. Videos obtained from witnesses and verified by The Times confirmed three of the strikes.

Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof.

Russia’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has shielded it from scrutiny and made United Nations agencies reluctant to accuse the Russian Air Force of responsibility.

“The attacks on health in Syria, as well as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian facilities, are definitely war crimes, and they should be prosecuted at the level of the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of policy at Physicians for Human Rights. But Russia and China “shamefully” vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have referred those and other crimes in Syria to the court, she said.

The Russian government did not directly respond to questions about the four hospital bombings. Instead, a Foreign Ministry spokesman pointed to past statements saying that the Russian Air Force carries out precision strikes only on “accurately researched targets.”

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, opened an investigation into the hospital bombings in August. The investigation, still going on, is meant in part to determine why hospitals that voluntarily added their locations to a United Nations-sponsored deconfliction list, which was provided to Russia and other combatants to prevent them from being attacked, nevertheless came under attack.

Syrian health care workers said they believed that the United Nations list actually became a target menu for the Russian and Syrian air forces.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the secretary general, said in September that the investigation — an internal board of inquiry — would not produce a public report or identify “legal responsibility.” Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian permanent representative to the United Nations, cast doubt on the process shortly after it was announced, saying he hoped the inquiry would not investigate perpetrators but rather what he said was the United Nations’ use of false information in its deconfliction process.

From April 29 to mid-September, as Russian and Syrian government forces assaulted the last rebel pocket in the northwest, 54 hospitals and clinics in opposition territory were attacked, the United Nations human rights office said. At least seven had tried to protect themselves by adding their location to the deconfliction list, according to the World Health Organization.

On May 5 and 6, Russia attacked four. All were on the list.

The first was Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital, a major underground trauma center in southern Idlib Province serving about 200,000 people. The hospital performed on average around 500 operations and saw more than 5,000 patients a month, according to Syria Relief and Development, the United States-based charity that supported it.

Nabad al Hayat had been attacked three times since it opened in 2013 and had recently relocated to an underground complex on agricultural land, hoping to be protected from airstrikes.

At 2:32 p.m. on May 5, a Russian ground control officer can be heard in an Air Force transmission providing a pilot with a longitude and latitude that correspond to Nabad al Hayat’s exact location.

At 2:38 p.m., the pilot reports that he can see the target and has the “correction,” code for locking the target on a screen in his cockpit. Ground control responds with the green light for the strike, saying, “Three sevens.”

At the same moment, a flight spotter on the ground logs a Russian jet circling in the area.

At 2:40 p.m., the same time the charity said that Nabad al Hayat was struck, the pilot confirms the release of his weapons, saying, “Worked it.” Seconds later, local journalists filming the hospital in anticipation of an attack record three precision bombs penetrating the roof of the hospital and blowing it out from the inside in geysers of dirt and concrete.

The staff of Nabad al Hayat had evacuated three days earlier after receiving warnings and anticipating a bombing, but Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital, three miles northwest, was not as lucky.

A doctor who worked there said that the hospital was struck four times, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The strikes landed about five minutes apart, without warning, he said, killing a man who was standing outside and forcing patients and members of the medical staff to use oxygen tanks to breathe through the choking dust.

A spotter logged a Russian jet circling above at the time of the strike, and in another Russian Air Force transmission, a pilot reports that he has “worked” his target at 5:30 p.m., the time of the strike. He then reports three more strikes, each about five minutes apart, matching the doctor’s chronology.

Russian pilots bombed two other hospitals in the same 12-hour span: Kafr Zita Cave Hospital and Al Amal Orthopedic Hospital. In both cases, spotters recorded Russian Air Force jets in the skies at the time of the strike, and Russian pilots can be heard in radio transmissions “working” their targets at the times the strikes were reported.

Since May 5, at least two dozen hospitals and clinics in the rebel-held northwest have been hit by airstrikes. Syrian medical workers said they expected hospital bombings to continue, given the inability of the United Nations and other countries to find a way to hold Russia to account.

“The argument by the Russians or the regime is always that hospitals are run by terrorists,” said Nabad al Hayat’s head nurse, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared being targeted. “Is it really possible that all the people are terrorists?”

“The truth is that after hospitals are hit, and in areas like this where there is just one hospital, our houses have become hospitals.”

Reporting was contributed by Dmitriy Khavin, Whitney Hurst, Malachy Browne, Quoctrung Bui and John Ismay.

Like ‘Working in a Prison’: Six Years in the Hell of Syria’s Hospitals

By Carlotta Gall | Published October 11, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 13, 2019 |

ELAZIG, Turkey — “This is my little hero,” the surgeon said, showing off a photo of a baby drinking from a bottle, her head heavily bandaged.

The picture was no family snapshot, but a memento of one of the youngest patients Dr. Omar Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Egyptian neurosurgeon, had saved during six years volunteering in the war in Syria.

Six-month-old Fatima had arrived at his field hospital in the besieged city of Aleppo comatose and in spasm, with a shrapnel injury to her brain, he said. “It was my first time to do this type of operation,” he recalled. “It was just me. I was nervous. What if she died or if I injured her brain?”

After six years working in basements under bombardment in one of the world’s most dangerous war zones, Dr. Ibrahim has been granted entry into Turkey and is finally taking a break. Drinking tea on a wooded university campus in the town of Elazig in eastern Turkey last month, he flicked through photos and videos on his cellphone, recalling the worst and best moments working just yards from the front line.

Fatima survived, and he carries a second photo on his cellphone showing the moment she emerged from a coma, opened her mouth, and yelled. “Babies’ brains are very flexible,” he said. “We had amazing recoveries of babies, really amazing.”

The son of an accountant from the middle-sized city of Sohag on the upper reaches of the Nile in Egypt, Dr. Ibrahim never planned to go to war. He had thought to go to Britain to pursue a career as a neurosurgeon.

But the Arab Spring intervened.

He was still in medical school in Sohag and watched from the sidelines when Egypt was convulsed by demonstrations that brought down President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Later, he joined meetings and helped treat wounded demonstrators when clashes broke out with the police.

“We all felt something had to be changed,” he said.

Egypt offered little to his generation of graduates. “Corruption, the health system, education,” were all concerns, he said. Low salaries and a lack of equipment and drugs in Egypt meant that most doctors looked abroad to pursue a career, he said. None of his four brothers, all college educated, found permanent employment in Egypt.

In 2013, when the revolution was crushed and President Mohamed Morsi and his supporters were jailed, Dr. Ibrahim joined an exodus of young, educated Egyptians. “We all felt the revolution was finished,” he said. “There was a huge wave of depression.”

He was 26 and halfway through his residency at Sohag University Hospital when he saw an appeal for doctors in Syria. Protests in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad had by then developed into a full-scale armed conflict, and he saw an opportunity to help.

It was not the career move that Dr. Ibrahim had planned, but he took it. “I wanted to take the risk to start somewhere to achieve something good,” he said.

It was an easy two-day trip to the war zone. In Aleppo, with medical personnel fleeing, an extra surgeon was welcomed and he settled in.

He missed home cooking and lost weight, though. “They use a lot of lemon and don’t like salt,” he complained of Syrian cooking. He kept in touch with his family, but never told them he was in Syria. “I said I was on the Turkish border helping refugees.”

For the first few months, with no equipment, the doctors could only stabilize patients with brain injuries and send them by car to Turkey, a dangerous drive of several hours. Most patients died on the way, or overnight awaiting transfer, he said.

That changed when he and his colleagues found and repaired an old CT scanner. “It was like from the 19th century,” he said. The machine took 15 minutes to produce images — modern scanners take two to three minutes — but it allowed him to start operating on skull fractures.

In January 2014, the Syrian American Medical Society, which was supporting one of the field hospitals, hired him and began to help with equipment. A few months later, he conducted his first brain surgery, extracting skull fragments from a patient’s brain, with a senior surgeon observing.

He had planned to stay only a few months, but put off leaving. “I had to stay,” he said. “It was getting worse: more injuries, more doctors leaving.” Crossing back into Turkey along smuggling routes also became dangerous. “I was procrastinating,” he said. “I am not a very risky person.”

But as the Syrian government closed its grip on the city, Aleppo became one of the most dangerous war zones on Earth, and hospitals and medical clinics became frequent targets of government bombs. He lived and worked in three field hospitals, operating underground for two years.

The medical staff learned the rhythm of the bombing — jets and helicopters began at 9 a.m. and eased off at nightfall — and would venture upstairs for an hour to eat, before shelling from nearby government posts sent them back underground.

For a few months there was a cease-fire and he found respite visiting Syrian friends in the countryside outside Aleppo. He even got engaged, after a friend introduced him to Joud, a 23-year-old social worker who worked in the administration of a charity.

As the bombing intensified, casualties rose. A month after their engagement in 2016, Joud was killed in a bombing on her way home from work. Dr. Ibrahim withdrew into himself for a few days in grief and anger. “I did not feel like talking to anyone.” Soon, though, he returned to work. “Other people lost more than me,” he said.

The hospital was swamped by the wounded in the last months of the siege. “I could not go out of the hospital for a few minutes, because any second a shell might fall on us,” he said. “I was someone else. Not sleeping. Not walking. Like you are in a prison and working in a prison.”

The hardest day was when he was forced to operate on the floor of the intensive care unit, as the beds and operating rooms were all occupied. “The hospital was very crowded — I needed to do surgery immediately,” he said.

The patient was comatose with a brain injury and one of his pupils dilated, an indication of life-threatening pressure from bleeding on the brain. “Every minute counts,” Dr. Ibrahim said. “I drilled a small hole and the patient stabilized.”

He never knew the man’s name, but the patient visited him two months later for a checkup. “I was standing like stone,” Dr. Ibrahim recalled. “I did not expect him to survive.”

In December 2016, after Turkey and Russia negotiated an end to the siege of Aleppo, Dr. Ibrahim helped evacuate 50 patients from the hospital and then joined doctors and civilians in the first of a convoy of buses carrying the last survivors.

“We left Aleppo destroyed. It was not the Aleppo that we knew,” he said. “Some people burned their houses, because they knew they would not come back.” He used a medical term to describe his own feelings as he left the hospital and his instruments behind: “Flatline.”

He ended up in Idlib, the last opposition-controlled province in northwestern Syria, along with several million displaced Syrians, and after a few months began working in a provincial hospital.

But the Syrian government, intent on reasserting its control throughout the country, began an offensive against Idlib this spring. The daily bombing brought back all the horrors of Aleppo, and once again he began operating underground.

His options were scant, as he told The New York Times in May: become a refugee or return to Egypt, where he could be prosecuted for traveling to Syria to work with the rebels.

Then medical colleagues threw him a lifeline, helping arrange his entry into Turkey, where a professor in neurosurgery accepted him on a three-month observer program at Firat University in Elazig.

One month after escaping the war, he says he feels disconnected and depressed, living in a strange town where he doesn’t speak the language. Refocusing on his career, he says he is determined to return to war surgery.

“I have more to do, I am still young, I have energy,” he said. “It’s the start of my life.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

#russia #syrianrefugees #syrian kurds #syrian war #syria news #syria #syria civil war #war crimes #war criminals #middle east #middleeast #سوريا syria #conflict in syria #united nations

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