"In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including isis, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”
Thousands of physicians once worked in Aleppo, formerly Syria’s most populous city, but the assault has resulted in an exodus of ninety-five per cent of them to neighboring countries and to Europe. Across Syria, millions of civilians have no access to care for chronic illnesses, and the health ministry routinely prevents U.N. convoys from delivering medicines and surgical supplies to besieged areas. In meetings, the U.N. Security Council “strongly condemns” such violations of international humanitarian law. In practice, however, four of its five permanent members support coalitions that attack hospitals in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. The conditions in Syria have led to a growing sense among medical workers in other conflict zones that they, too, may be targeted...
[In late 2102] To handle the logistics, Aziz, of Light of Life, formed a group called the Aleppo City Medical Council. There were eight main medical facilities, and, with only twenty physicians and a handful of surgical specialists in the opposition-held half of the city, the staff used walkie-talkies to coördinate the distribution of patients. To evade detection, the doctors established sequential code names for each hospital, M1 through M8. Most of the staff had little, if any, formal training.
Eventually, the doctors built other medical centers and gave them random names, like M20 and M30, to obscure the actual number of targets. According to Aziz, the best location for a medical facility is on a narrow street, flanked by tall buildings, so that, after an air strike, helicopters and jets have difficulty tracking the movement of wounded civilians. Ambulance workers were routinely targeted by snipers and helicopters, so many of them removed sirens and medical logos, and coated their vans with mud. At night, they drove with the headlights off...
The emergency department at M1 was run by medical students. “Before David arrived, no one knew how to cut open a chest,” Abu Waseem, a young medical worker specializing in plastic and reconstructive surgery, told me...
Nott continues to advise the medical staff at M1 from afar. Earlier this year, he and his wife, Elly, a former Middle East researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, started a foundation to run surgical-training courses for doctors who live in war zones. In April, he and Darwish travelled to southern Turkey for the first session, held at a university in Gaziantep. Thirty-two Syrians attended, coming from Aleppo, Idlib, Homs, and Latakia provinces.
One of Nott’s best students is Abu Waseem. When the war began, he was a fourth-year plastic- and reconstructive-surgery resident at a government hospital. “He sacrificed his future” to continue treating patients in Syria, Aziz told me. “He has no way to graduate, no way to do his fifth or sixth year and become a specialist.” While other physicians in Aleppo take frequent breaks and visit family members who have escaped to Turkey, Abu Waseem remains at M1, because he doesn’t have a passport."
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