iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Patients with serious wounds and diseases that can’t be treated in the besieged part of Aleppo, Syria, were not able to leave the city Friday as planned.
Medical evacuations were supposed to begin Friday after Russia said it extended a “humanitarian pause” to allow patients, other civilians and rebels to leave the besieged city through corridors. Russian and Syrian officials have suggested that after the cease-fire, the Russian and Syrian armies will launch a new offensive on Aleppo to clear the area of the rebels fighting the Syrian government, which is besieging the eastern part of Aleppo. But the United Nations and medical sources in Aleppo said that the evacuations could not be carried out Friday because of lack of security assurances.
“We are in desperate need to evacuate injured and sick children, women and elderly, but there is no guarantee for their safety,” Mohamed Abu Rajab, a radiologist in the besieged part of Aleppo, told ABC News. “We don’t trust the Syrian government. How can people who are killing us guarantee our safety? We don’t want to cooperate with them. We want to cooperate with the world community and humanitarian organizations, but how can we cooperate with our killers?”
After a U.S.-Russia brokered cease-fire collapsed on Sept. 19, the Syrian government launched an offensive on east Aleppo, which has killed at least 500 people and injured 2,000, with more than a quarter of all deaths being children, according to the U.N. Humanitarian organizations have criticized Russia and the Syrian government for using cluster bombs, chemical weapons and bunker-buster bombs, targeting civilians sheltering underground in the past month.
Among the patients who are in need of urgent evacuation out of east Aleppo are people who suffer from nerve injuries, renal fractures, eye wounds and heart diseases, as well as people in comas and malnourished children, said Abu Rajab. The besieged part of Aleppo has not received any aid since early July, according to the U.N., which means that the estimated 275,000 people who live there are in need of food, clean water, gas and health care.
“Unfortunately, medical evacuations were not able to commence in eastern Aleppo this morning as planned because the conditions to ensure a safe, secure and voluntary evacuation of those in need and their families were not in place. All parties to the conflict and those with influence over them need to ensure that all conditions are in place so we can proceed with this urgently needed medical evacuation as soon as possible,” David Swanson, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told ABC News.
Swanson and the U.N.’s spokesperson for the Office of the Special Envoy for Syria declined to comment on what security assurances it is waiting for before evacuations can take place, but they said that the U.N. and its partners are present and ready in west Aleppo to carry out a detailed operational plan as soon as conditions allow. If evacuations take place, the U.N. would start with evacuating a small number of urgent cases and their families from east Aleppo to either west Aleppo or to the Bab al-Hawa hospital in Idlib on Day 1. “That will allow us to test the safety and effectiveness of the operation,” said Swanson.
According to Physicians for Human Rights, 95 percent of medical personnel who were in Aleppo before the war have fled, been detained or were killed. Several health facilities have been bombed leaving only around five hospitals left functioning to service thousands of people, according to the U.N., which estimates that about 30 doctors are left in Aleppo.
Abu Rajab used to be the manager at one of the largest hospitals in Aleppo, which is now out of service after being bombed multiple times. At the hospital, Abu Rajab helped treat Omran Daqneesh, the boy whose photo of him sitting in an ambulance was seen by millions of people. A video showing Omran touching his wounded head and wiping away the blood without shedding a tear has come to symbolize the humanitarian suffering in Aleppo. In a recent interview with Swiss TV SRF1, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called the image of Omran fake. To Abu Rajab that is an example of why he doesn’t trust that the Syrian government will guarantee the safety of civilians leaving through the corridors, as Syria claims.
“You saw a Swiss journalist with the head of the government,” Abu Rajab said. “When he saw the photo of Omran what did he say? He lied. Omran was at our hospital. We treated him. And he says ‘this is fabricated.’ How can we trust him when he doesn’t tell the truth?”
Thursday, medical sources in Aleppo said they treated 12 civilians who were wounded by gunfire as they tried to leave Aleppo through one of the corridors. Aleppo residents said that they heard the sound of clashes near a corridor in the Bustan al-Qasr area.
During an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva today, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief said that Aleppo has become a “slaughterhouse.”
“The ancient city of Aleppo, a place of millennial civility and beauty, is today a slaughterhouse — a gruesome locus of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed,” the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a speech to the council.
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