OSU doctor grateful US intervened in Syria

Each time he leaves his native Syria, Dr. Iyad Azrak of Bellefontaine tells himself that conditions there can’t get any worse.

Each time he returns, he discovers that he has been proved wrong.

The Aleppo of Azrak’s youth has been pummeled into rubble. The ground shakes night and day. He has watched bombs tumble from planes and winced at the odor of chlorine gas.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians still call this hellscape home.

“It’s just massive destruction, as far as you can see, in some neighborhoods,” said Azrak, an ophthalmologist who also teaches at Ohio State University.

At various times in the six years since Arab Springinspired protests triggered the country’s slide into civil war, Azrak has returned to Syria to offer whatever aid he could. For much of the war, he wondered whether the United States ever would intervene with force. He found out on Thursday night, when President Donald Trump ordered U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base that had been used to launch a sarin gas attack on civilians two days earlier.

The tactical and political fallout of Trump’s strike

against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will play out in the coming days and months. Critics are calling it a strategic misstep that drags the U.S. into another Middle Eastern conflict in which we have no stake.

Azrak disagrees, calling the strike a deserved blow to a regime that has engaged in war crimes with impunity.

“What happened (Thursday) night was the right thing,” Azrak said. “It’s overdue.”

Azrak, 40, was born and raised in Aleppo. He attended medical school in Syria before coming to the U.S. in 2001 to further his training at the Cleveland Clinic, in Louisiana, and finally at OSU. He and his wife, who is from Michigan, liked central Ohio and settled down.

The suffering he has witnessed in Syria is hard to describe and impossible to shake.

Jets streak overhead day and night, providing a steady roar that is peppered by explosions. Azrak has seen so-called barrel bombs dropped on civilian neighborhoods.

He recalled that a Palestinian doctor, no stranger to practicing medicine in war zones, was baffled about why bombs were striking so near their hospital. He asked why the Syrian doctors didn’t provide the regime with their GPS coordinates so the shelling could be adjusted.

“This is a place that’s not supposed to be bombed,” the Palestinian said.

“Not with the Assad regime,” Azrak said.

In Syria, he said, hospitals are desired targets. One local cluster of rebels told doctors that they were relocating because they were afraid of being hit by errant bombs meant for the hospital. Two weeks ago, a doctor in the city of Hama was killed by a chemical bomb as he operated on a patient.

Assad has been in power since 2000, and his father controlled the country for 29 years before that. Even before the civil war erupted, the regime was known for crushing its opposition and making its “enemies” disappear, Azrak said.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize that this old kind of one-party regime still exists,” Azrak said.

He was frustrated when the U.S. warned Assad in 2012 that use of chemical weapons would bring swift consequences, only to balk when Assad did exactly that the following year. He said Assad took that inaction as a sign that the world did not want to get involved, giving him license to commit further atrocities.

Now, Azrak hopes, that has changed.

“When you send 50 missiles, that’s a big message,” Azrak said. “We have the moral responsibility to intervene.”

Life in the U.S. is “a huge blessing,” he said. Nowhere is that clearer to him than in Syria, where bombs fall on children and warplanes rend the sky.