Medical Neutrality

Attacks on Syria's medical community and infrastructure have devastated the health-care system. Government forces – and sometimes opposition groups – have deliberately targeted medical professionals, hospitals, ambulances, and supplies, preventing untold numbers of people from getting medical care and stopping medical professionals from providing services when they are critically needed.

Ukrainian doctors and paramedics fearing for their lives have appealed to the international community for help amid claims they are being deliberately targeted by police during bloody clashes between riot police and anti-government protestors in Kiev. International rights monitoring groups as well as local non-governmental organisations have documented scores of attacks and injuries to members of the Red Cross, doctors, and volunteer health workers treating the wounded and injured over the past few weeks.

It was the third week of an uprising in Syria that would eventually evolve into a brutal civil war and already the wounded were showing up at the hospital in the Damascus suburb where 29-year-old Ahmed was doing rotations during his medical residency. Ahmed, who asked that only one part of his name be published because he is afraid of repercussions from Syria’s security agencies, had only just started examining a young man with bruises and a deep puncture wound on his right side when two armed security officials burst into the examining room barking questions.

The images of Imran Khan and other PTI men administering polio drops to children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been welcomed and appreciated by many. This is especially significant given that militants in the province have rejected and obstructed polio vaccinations for some years now. Also, just over this last year, the systematic murders and attacks on polio workers across the country have become as endemic as the disease.

Adnan Ismail worked as a doctor in a Syrian government hospital. But civil war led him to a farm field where he and friends labored nights in secret to build a makeshift rebel-run clinic. For a year, Dr. Ismail helped dig walls and stairs to fashion an underground bunker that was eventually equipped for surgery, he said. Dr. Adnan Ismail led a secret life tending to Syrian rebels and civilians hurt by government forces.