Dire medical needs
Every day, 10 to 20 people are brought across the border — children with bullets in their skulls, old men whose feet are swollen and red with gaping wounds, young men paralyzed from the waist down because of shrapnel or bullets.
(The Washington Post/Source: Staff reports)
Syria: A year in bloodshed
The three rehabilitation centers in Reyhanli are staffed by Syrian physicians, many of whom left their country to avoid arrest for treating rebels and civilian protesters. Most do not have licenses to provide more than rudimentary care. They fear torture and death if they return to Syria.
“This is the first time a government has targeted physicians,” said Yazji, who as head of the umbrella Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations makes periodic forays into besieged Syrian towns. He said that about 50 Syrian doctors have been arrested and killed since the uprising began. There were signs of torture on their bodies when they were returned to their families, he said.
Much of the humanitarian aid in Reyhanli is backed by donations from affluent Syrian expatriates. A small hospital, for example, is funded by the owner of Orient TV — a prominent Syrian opposition figure whose network broadcasts from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
There is bitterness that more international aid has not been forthcoming. “We understand not providing weapons,” said Yasser Said, a Syrian lawyer who manages an 80-bed rehabilitation center in the town. “But why not medical supplies?”
Hussein al-Mustafa, a surgeon who said he fled the northwestern Syrian province of Aleppo to avoid arrest for helping protesters, ticked off some of the needs. One rehabilitation center secured an X-ray machine, but it was so old that doctors could not find film for it. The center cannot afford Clexane, a medicine that stops blood from forming potentially life-threatening clots. There are far too few wheelchairs and just a week’s supply of the painkiller Gabapentin for the 25 patients who need it.
In a room painted a milky green, 12-year-old Salah Hussein Gayari lay in a bed, with two metal fragments lodged in his spine and another in his blinded right eye. He is paralyzed below the waist.
Salah, who has soccer in his soul and wants to be a doctor when he grows up, said he was heading to the market in his village of Abu Dhour, near Idlib, when an artillery shell fell nearby. Neighbors drove him to Turkey to be operated on.
Two older brothers who had joined the rebel forces left to keep watch over him. Doctors told them that Salah needs more specialized care to remove the remaining metal from his body. “Can you take him somewhere out of the country?” the brother asked a visitor.
Building institutions
Yazji said he will move his organization’s headquarters to the hospital at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing as soon as it opens. He believes that the Assad regime will collapse within weeks, not months. And he has told his wife that the next time they meet, it will be in Syria.
Wassim Taha, head of the Syrian Organization for Refugees, thinks it will take much longer. But he, too, is planning for the future. His focus has shifted from coordinating aid to building institutions.
More than 30 civilian councils have been formed in northern Syria that can distribute funds and provide other help, said Taha, working out of an apartment office equipped with two laptops and a desk. He is trying to get lawyers to establish civil courts and is seeking money to pay the salaries of lawyers, judges and police officers. Taha said that several European governments have provided financial backing for the building of civil institutions but that the United States has not.
“If it takes a long time, the extremists will take over,” said Taha, a former fashion designer who was involved in opposition politics for many years. “It will destroy Syria.”
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