Health Workers

Although the government has denied attacking Fallujah General Hospital, the weapons used in the attacks – mortar shells, direct fire weapons, and barrel bombs – are consistent with Iraqi military equipment. In deliberately attacking the hospital, the government of Iraq has unfortunately followed the nefarious example of its Syrian neighbor. The conflicts in Syria and Iraq possess unique traits, but they share some underlying factors.

The three-year-old civil war continues to rage, with its mounting toll of more than 160,000 people killed and millions displaced in Syria and neighboring countries. Undeterred by any sense of moral compass, Mr. Assad is flattening cities, blocking food aid from rebel-held areas and, according to Physicians for Human Rights, systematically attacking doctors and health care facilities, an especially heinous action that violates the norms of war and can constitute a crime against humanity under international law.

(Kabul)—ACBAR (the Agency Coordinating Body of Afghan Relief and Development) has been aggrieved to hear of the attack on an NGO ambulance in Nangarhar and in Badakhshan provinces (Afghanistan) providing essential assistance to a patient. Once again, ACBAR wants to reiterate its strong condemnation of any attack, intimidation, violence or threats against NGOs working in Afghanistan. ACBAR appeals to all parties to the Afghan conflict to respect the neutrality of NGOs as well as to allow humanitarian access to those in need.

Experts are calling for increased protection to healthcare workers and patients in crisis situations in the face of growing attacks on health facilities, which challenge notions of their neutrality. “We need multiple and reinforcing means to protect health care in situations of violence, including the well-developed mechanisms of human rights monitoring, reporting and accountability,” Leonard Rubenstein, chair of Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a group of humanitarian and human rights organizations, told IRIN from the World Health Assembly, which is being held from 19 to 24 May in Geneva.

Just because time advances, it doesn’t mean conditions get better. It wasn’t all that long ago that polio had largely been eradicated from the world. But polio is back—in Nigeria, in Syria and, more significantly, in Pakistan. The story is complex, woven with political issues that seem to be unrelated to the reemergence of this horrible disease.