Samer Attar

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Medics treated a man injured by a barrel bomb explosion in eastern Aleppo, on July 16. Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The hospital where I work in Aleppo, Syria, is in a basement. The building above has been bombarded so many times that the top floors are too dangerous to use. Barrels and sandbags line the entrance to fortify it as a bunker.

Aleppo is a long way from my home in Chicago. That city, too, has its share of human suffering. Any Chicago surgeon who takes emergency duty can attest to the gun violence that plagues local communities. But the hospital where I work has state-of-the-art resources and some of the best doctors and nurses in the world. Scalpels are sharp, operating rooms are sterile, and specialists are abundant.…  Seguir leyendo »

A child in Aleppo, Syria, is asked to draw a picture at school.

He paints a world on fire: helicopters dropping bombs, a house collapsing into rubble. He draws himself, crying on his knees, surrounded by his friends -- dead, dismembered, decapitated, and bleeding.

This is the type of sad reality that we have seen far too often as physicians working inside Syrian field hospitals -- children across the country living in hell. It is time to act if we are to prevent such heartrending scenes being played endlessly into the future.

Every day we were in Syria we saw innocent people suffering and dying in abysmal conditions.…  Seguir leyendo »

Surgery without anesthesia is a miserable and brutal reality in Syria. Doctors report that demolished hospitals and humanitarian blockades have left some Syrians to suffer, awake, through amputations and Cesarean sections.

I saw similar horrors while working in a northern Syrian field hospital under airstrikes in August. I operated on children who had the bone fragments of obliterated bystanders embedded in their skin. Children shot by snipers were pronounced dead in front of grieving parents. Civilians with bellies torn open from shelling held their intestines in their hands while pleading for help. Some lucky enough to have survived shrapnel wounds succumbed to gangrene and required amputations.…  Seguir leyendo »

Aleppo truly is a horrible place to be.

Once a vibrant, cosmopolitan city, it has become an apocalyptic landscape scarred by destruction. Snipers shoot people waiting in bread lines, and airstrikes crush families in their sleep.

There are still good people in Aleppo — innocent, noncombatant civilians. Some are too poor or sick to flee; some refuse on principle to leave their homes.

They face a difficult choice: Risk death, disease, starvation and perennial homelessness as refugees in a camp with open sewers, living in tents and enduring dehydration in the summer and freezing in the winter. Or risk bullets, shrapnel and incineration at home.…  Seguir leyendo »