After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical facility attacked since late April.
Mr. Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare. Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities were spared.
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That has changed. Governments increasingly turn on civilians, and hospitals and medical workers are being deliberately targeted in an effort to silence them. Doctors are tortured and killed. Health care workers have been robbed, looted, beaten and murdered in Central African Republic, Congo, Lebanon and Myanmar.
Nowhere is this more obvious than Syria. In May, Rola Hallam, a British-trained Syrian anesthetist, crossed the border from Turkey into Ghandoura, a small town in the northern Aleppo countryside. After passing through several armed checkpoints, she reached the Hope Hospital for Children, which she and her colleagues had built in just three months in 2017.
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