Syrian kids face hopeless conditions to survive
Malnourished babies streaming into displacement camp
Skeletal babies streaming into a displacement camp in northeastern Syria now face a race against malnutrition.
Truckloads of gaunt women and children fleeing Daesh’s last stand in the Euphrates Valley disembark daily at the Al-Hol camp, including 200 who arrived on Thursday.
“They’re just skin and bones when they get here,” Kurdish Red Crescent (KRC) pediatrician Dr. Antar Senno told AFP at a makeshift clinic in Al-Hol.
They have suffered desperate conditions in the last pocket held by Daesh near the village of Baghouz, close to the Iraqi border, with little food, water or medicine.
KRC workers quickly scan the infants — particularly those under a year old — for thin limbs, taut and dried-out skin, or signs of diarrhea, said Senno.
“The team combs the entire reception tent. If they see a case that could be malnutrition, they immediately pull the child aside and put him in an ambulance,” he said. But the journey does not end there.
Medics at Al-Hol, which has been flooded with more than 25,000 displaced people in recent weeks as military operations ramped up, do not have the capacity to treat severely malnourished children and must send them on to hospitals in the city of Hasakah an hour away. That makes every moment even more precious, said Senno.
“They’re practically dead when they get here. But if we can catch them and send them to hospital in Hasakah, we can save their lives,” he said.
“It’s not about the same day. It’s about the same minute.”
More than 37,000 people have fled the shrinking Daesh-held enclave in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor as the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces bear down on the militants.
Many walk for days in the desert to reach an SDF-run collection point, where they are screened, provided with some food and water and loaded into trucks for the hours-long journey north to Al-Hol.
But that desert odyssey can be deadly — at least 35 newborns and infants have died either en route to the camp or just after they arrive, according to the UN.
One camp worker told AFP he saw women tumble out of trucks cradling lifeless babies, not knowing they had died on the road. Three-month-old Ahmad had a close call, said his Iraqi mother, Istabraq.
“I was breastfeeding while in Baghouz but it wasn’t enough,”