Aleppo survivors are ‘in a desperate state’
Countrywide ceasefire supposed to take effect, paving the way for peace talks
LONDON — For 15 hours a day, the flow of wounded men, women and children from the remains of Syria’s largest city did not stop.
Aleppo residents — evacuated to the countryside after a six-month siege — came with bones jutting through skin, limbs succumbing to gangrene and shrapnel still buried in their wounds.
“They looked almost like they were coming out of a concentration camp,” said David Nott, a British surgeon who spent eight days in Syria’s Idlib province treating the injured.
Nott works in operating theatres at three London hospitals, but has made repeated medical trips into Syria since fighting began in 2011. He trained many of the doctors who worked in east Aleppo’s makeshift hospitals throughout the regime siege and Russian bombardment and wanted to be there to help when 30,000 civilians and fighters finally left the city under the terms of a ceasefire deal.
During a frenetic week of surgery, he operated on 90 people, including 30 children. The patients were “in a desperate state” after months with little food and the harrowing journey out of the city through snow and freezing temperatures, Nott said.
“They were coming in not just injured but dehydrated, malnourished, and psychologically traumatized,” he said.
Nott’s remarks come amid at least one small glimmer of hope for Syria: the Syrian government and the armed opposition agreed Thursday to a nationwide ceasefire leading to peace talks, in a breakthrough truce aimed at ending the bloody fiveyear conflict.
Doctors in Aleppo focused on saving “lives not limbs” and performed hundreds of rapid amputations with only Valium and ketamine to offer their patients for the pain. With no way of sterilizing the wounds, the injuries became infected and Nott and his colleagues were sometimes forced to amputate a second time to keep people alive.
“They would have amputated below the knee but all these wounds were infected and so we had to perform amputations above the knee to get less infection,” he said.
Nott said he was probably seeing the strongest of the Aleppo residents. Many elderly and children would have died of their wounds weeks before being able to get out.
“What we were seeing was probably the tip of the iceberg.”
One case struck him: a fourmonth-old girl who arrived with two broken legs and a fractured arm. Both her parents had been killed.
“I treated her and had to leave her and hope she gets through to Turkey (which is taking the more severely wounded for treatment). She’s a beautiful little baby but she’s not eating or drinking and will be dead in a week if she doesn’t get treatment,” he said.
The new ceasefire, to start at midnight local time, follows talks between Turkey and Russia and could potentially lead to a lasting political agreement.
If the truce lasts, regime and opposition groups will sit down for peace talks in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, next month. Moscow and Ankara, which support opposing sides in the conflict, promised to act as guarantors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in Moscow that three documents had been signed: an agreement between the Syrian government and the rebels on a ceasefire, measures for overseeing the truce and an agreement to start peace talks. He described the deal as “fragile” but expressed optimism it would hold.
Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, said the truce would include 62,000 opposition fighters from seven armed groups across Syria, but will exclude Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the formerly al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS). Those who do not observe the ceasefire “will be treated as terrorists,” Shoigu said.