‘It’s not wounds we’re treating – bodies are being blown to pieces’
Doctors in Syrian border clinics describe the horror and injuries after Moscow’s bombing raids on Aleppo
AFTER five years of war, the doctor working in a Syrian border clinic thought he had seen everything. But with last week’s Russian bombing raids, there was still worse to come.
The latest surge in Moscow’s air campaign was causing so many injuries and wounds so severe that traumatised staff were working 24-hour shifts to cope, Dr Adel said.
“We’re not even treating wounds anymore – the bodies are just blown to pieces,” said the director of the clinic, near Turkey’s Oncupinar border crossing. His staff said that most of the injured were civilians, due to indiscriminate bombing of residential areas.
For more than three years, when rebels swept into the east of Aleppo many of the casualties have ended up in Kilis, nestled on the Turkish side of the border.
The director of an unofficial shelter, who asked not to give a full name, said his staff were witnessing “extreme” injuries” and that the rate of amputation had soared. “Sometimes our nerves fall apart,” he said. “Sometimes we cry. These men are our people and our families are the ones fleeing.”
On the day of The Daily Telegraph’s visit, one of the shelter’s usual patients, a 75-year-old man from Aleppo, was at a condolences ceremony for the sixth of his sons to have died in the conflict.
In interviews from their hospital beds, rebel fighters said that Russian air power had transformed the battle for Aleppo’s north.
“When it was just the regime that bombed us, one or two low-flying planes would set out to bomb our villages and that was it. But the Russians, they strike us continuously,” said one man, pulling back his blanket to reveal a gaping hole in his femur, caused by a bomb he didn’t even hear coming.
Moscow waded into the Syrian war at the end of September, tipping the balance in favour of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
In Aleppo, it allowed Iranian-backed Shia fighters from the Lebanese militia Hizbollah, Afghanistan and Iraq to achieve in three days what government forces had failed to do in two years – encircle the rebels and break longstanding sieges on two nearby Shia towns.
That offensive forced more than 35,000 Syrians to flee, with most now camped in squalid conditions along Turkey’s closed border.
Numan Kurtulmus, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said last night that the country, which is already hosting more than 2.5 million Syrians, had “reached the limit of its capacity to absorb refugees”. But he added: “We are not in a position to tell them not to come. If we do, we would be abandoning them to their deaths.”
In a refugee camp at the Oncupinar crossing, Syrians said relatives on the other side of the closed crossing were preparing to return to the villages they had fled from, accepting that they would die. “My sons knew they wouldn’t get through, so they have gone back to their homes,” said Abu Mohamed. “I only wish that I could go with them. I am no better than them. They deserve death no more than me.” Although the war has claimed more than a quarter of a million lives, doctors in the Kilis rehabilitation shelter said no one could yet appreciate the toll it had taken on their country.
“It’s only when we return to Syria one day that we’ll see how many amputees, how many widows, how many orphans there really are,” said one medic. “That’s when we’ll learn what this war has done to us.”
The mother of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has died at the age of 86 in the capital Damascus.
Anisa, the former first lady and widow of Hafez al-Assad had been ill for many years.