Civil War Turns Syria's Doctors Into Masters of Improvisation

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Basil at a rehabilitation center.TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR

PETER SCHWARTZSTEIN
12.16.16.
7:00 AM

BASIL AL-REABI WAS riding home from school in southern Syria, in the fall of 2014, when a roadside bomb struck. The eight-year-old watched as shrapnel shredded his classmates and reduced them to a collection of body parts. As the remnants of the minibus bounced, rolled, and finally came to rest at the foot of a low embankment, three of his limbs were scythed off, his cheeks peppered with shards of blue vehicle paint.

What was perhaps most shocking, though, about the boy’s experiences—and the nightmare that followed—was just how routine they’ve become in a country torn apart by civil war. In Basil’s opposition-controlled swath of the Deraa governorate, heavily-bombed and depopulated, the local field hospital had little medical equipment and even fewer drugs. Basil writhed around while staff desperately cast around for painkillers. And it fell to the lone medic in the district—a trainee oncologist—to attend to the boy’s brutal array of injuries. “Pain. I just remember pain,” Basil says.

That he survived at all, however, is testament to the exceptional resourcefulness of Syrian doctors, who, through five plus years of blood-soaked conflict, have devised a series of unique lifesaving practices. Clinic volunteers molded Basil’s bandages from moist printer paper to create a papier-mâché-like gauze over his bleeding stumps, while splinting his broken forearm with a tree branch. As the war has continued to escalate, these improvised treatments are the only thing preventing the death toll from spiralling even further out of control. Most estimates suggest at least 400,000 Syrians have been killed since early 2011.

“We’re in a state of never-ending emergency within an emergency,” says Hazem Rihawi, a lead NGO coordinator on the Turkish-Syrian border, who liaises between aid organizations and tries to identify where medical supplies are most needed. “We don’t have the resources for sophisticated surgery and treatment, so we’re pushing for [doctors] to use what you have.”

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/doctors-wartime-syria-innovate-amid-bombs-sieges/