It is a year since the regime launched a chemical attack that left hundreds dead
By The Economist
A YEAR ago today, August 21st, a chemical attack on Ghouta, an area on the outskirts of Damascus, left hundreds dead (the exact death toll has never been ascertained). Careful piecing together of the evidence by observers, including Elliot Higgins on his Brown Moses blog, established that the attack, using sarin gas, was carried out by government forces—a claim still denied by the regime in Damascus. In response to a threat of American strikes in retaliation, Bashar Assad, Syria's president, agreed to dispose of the country's chemical weapons. On August 19th American officials said they had completed the destruction of Syria's most lethal substances.
Despite this, Syria's conflict continues to be the deadliest in the world. Some 30,000 Syrians are estimated to have died so far this year—including cilvilians, regime soldiers and rebel fighters. As American airstrikes hit the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda-inspired outfit, in Iraq, it is growing next door in Syria where its brutal fighters are likely to push up the death toll further. On August 19th James Foley, an American journalist kidnapped in Syria in November 2012, became IS's latest victim, beheaded on video by a militant believed to be British.
For Syrians in Ghouta, the situation has continued to be dire in the year since the sarin attacks. Here Majed Abu Ali, a doctor from Ghouta who recently left to Turkey, reflects on what happened that night a year ago and on the current state of medical care in the area. The doctor works with several underground medical networks such as Al Seeraj, an aid organisation based in Minnesota.
The night of the chemical attack on August 21st 2013, one year ago today, was a night of hard decisions—whom to save and whom to leave. I’m a Syrian doctor working for a network of underground hospitals and a year later, we continue to face impossible decisions every day.
With almost 700,000 inhabitants, Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, used to be a wealthy agricultural area with 11 well-equipped hospitals and furniture galleries on every corner. Now it is easier to buy a gun than a chicken.
Since government checkpoint surround the region, with soldiers controlling what goes in and out, the cost of fuel has shot up. We pay $12-$15 for each litre of diesel and burn the furniture to keep essential medical services functioning. It is more expensive to live on the besieged outskirts of Damascus than New York or Dubai.
Every hospital in the region has been hit by rockets and bombs so we have organised wards in the basements of buildings to protect them from shelling. We have set up an emergency room in the basement of one home and a surgery in another part of the city so if one is hit the other can continue to treat the wounded. If we put them in one place, and there’s an attack, it would be catastrophic.
On the night of the chemical attack, we weren’t surprised by the gas. It had happened before but not on this scale. We were prepared. We’d contacted doctors outside Syria to understand what we needed to do. We’d scoured the internet and read books to get as much information as possible. We made a guide for all the hospitals so they knew what to do to help patients after a chemical attack.
But no one anticipated that so many people would need help. We expected to receive a few hundred people, not thousands. People slept and didn’t wake up. We tried to wake them up and they didn’t wake up. Whole families died. No medical team could handle a disaster like this.
One year on, the disaster continues. Doctors are overwhelmed by urgent cases every day. Every day we have 200-300 people needing care—mostly civilians rather than fighters—with close to 1000 operations every month because of rockets and bombs.
We’re trying to save lives under bombardment, without electricity or basic medicines. We can’t evacuate urgent cases and doctors are just waiting for the day when we’ll have no supplies to help people. Often there are no blood bags or there is no serum but one day there will be nothing. Last month we had to close two hospitals because they did not have the right tools to treat people. We didn’t have the fuel to keep the incubator going in one centre so now there is only one incubator for the 800 babies delivered in the area every month.
