Syria

Syria’s shattered health system is forcing health workers to engage in brutal medical practices and a series of epidemics have left millions of children exposed to a plethora of deadly diseases, Save the Children says in a new report. The report, ‘A Devastating Toll: the Impact of Three Years of War on the Health of Syria’s Children’, sheds light on a broken health system and its consequences: children not just dying from violent means but from diseases that would previously either have been treatable or prevented.

Washington, D.C. – The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) condemned the attack on a field hospital in Atmeh, Syria, supported by the Orient Foundation. A car bomb went off outside of the facility Sunday morning, February 23, 2014. The most recent reports from the hospital list 16 dead, including four medical staff and a number of children, additionally, the explosion left 65 wounded.

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.

Throughout 2013, international humanitarian actors have faced major challenges responding to conflicts and natural disasters across the globe. Tens of thousands of people died in Syria and millions were displaced while international actors struggled to get access to desperate people.

In Bahrain, two nurses and a doctor remain imprisoned during the holidays simply for doing their job: treating the injured during the government crackdown. Turkey is considering a bill that seeks to criminalize emergency medical care -- the latest example of the government trying to intimidate doctors for caring for those injured in last summer's protests.