8 June 2016
Three medical facilities were hit in the space of three hours, the UN says.
One of the hospitals targeted is one of the few that still provide paediatric services. Medics have had to take babies out of incubators, the UN says.
Another strike hit near the Bayan hospital in the eastern Shaar district, activists and a monitoring group said.
Video footage, purportedly of the aftermath, showed bodies being pulled from burning and destroyed buildings....
This is deliberate. There is suppose to be a ceasefire. There are reports of barrel bombs being dropped. Assad's forces can't get past using chemical weapons.
This is deliberate. There is suppose to be a ceasefire. There are reports of barrel bombs being dropped. Assad's forces can't get past using chemical weapons.
April 28, 2016
By Jason Beaubien
The al-Quds hospital in Aleppo, Syria, (click here) is the latest health care facility to get blown apart.
The 34-bed hospital was tucked into the lower floors of a five-story building in the Sukkari neighborhood of Aleppo. Sandbags blocked the windows and fortified the entrance. Concrete apartment buildings pressed on either side of it. Late Wednesday night, witnesses say, a low-flying fighter jet unleashed a missile that smashed directly into the hospital.
The airstrike killed at least 27 people, including Dr. Mohammed Wassim Moaz, a pediatrician who continued to work in Aleppo even as the Syrian civil war raged around him....
..."Increasingly [clinics] are forced literally underground," he says. "The only way these surgeons can work is in basements of hospitals, not normal facilities, bunkers practically, which is really restrictive and really difficult."
Sam Taylor, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders in Amman, Jordan, says al-Quds was a well-established hospital with an emergency room and an eight-bed pediatric ward.
"What this [attack] means in very practical terms is that one of the main facilities for women to give birth and children to receive treatment has now been destroyed," he says....
The borders have to be established to make the civil war aggression worthless. Attacks on hospitals is no mistake, it is a strategy to drive people out of the city. The aggression has to be ended. The borders where the rebels hold land has to be set by UN resolution. Assad cannot go on to believe such actions will result in more and more territory for his possession.
I am quite certain this is ethnic cleansing. Aleppo is at the northern border of Alawite coastal territory. There was an attack by rebels against the Alawite region within the past couple of months. The Alawite are known to be peaceful people and welcome all ethnicities and religions.
Aleppo is not a goal in itself, (click here) but territorial gains are limited to the aim of fragmenting the opposition forces before any political settlement is reached. The regime and its allies know that it would be impossible to defeat the armed oppositions and reclaim all the Syrian territory.
They have opted for a strategy which isolates rebel-held areas from one another. By consigning the opposition to “islands”- isolated pockets of rebel-held territory surrounded by regime-held territory - the regime makes opposition forces vulnerable to repression and siege and dependent on regime allies to access further humanitarian supplies.
This strategy is systematic and coordinated at the highest levels within the regime. A military headquarters, called the United Center of Operation for the North, is managing a variety of regime-affiliated forces, including militias led by regime figures and Iranian advisers. It leads operations in Idlib, Aleppo and the north of Latakia, with the help of Russian air strikes....
...Apart from Aleppo being the largest city in Syria and the economic capital, whose recapturing would be of a military and psychological significance, liberating this particular city would be a boost to the Syrian government’s popular legitimacy. The people of Aleppo, who are predominantly Sunni, had stubbornly refused to get dragged into the “revolution” and, as a consequence, have suffered a lot. Therefore, a win in Aleppo would not only vindicate their steadfastness and sacrifices, but would be a win against the alternative project that is backed by regional players.
A win for the government in Aleppo would convince the armed rebellion that its fall is not imminent. People on the opposition side would be bound to ask questions on the sanity of continuing a fight and a suffering with no achievable goal on the horizon, which should lead to them attending the negotiations table with more realistic demands....
The airstrike killed at least 27 people, including Dr. Mohammed Wassim Moaz, a pediatrician who continued to work in Aleppo even as the Syrian civil war raged around him....
..."Increasingly [clinics] are forced literally underground," he says. "The only way these surgeons can work is in basements of hospitals, not normal facilities, bunkers practically, which is really restrictive and really difficult."
Sam Taylor, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders in Amman, Jordan, says al-Quds was a well-established hospital with an emergency room and an eight-bed pediatric ward.
"What this [attack] means in very practical terms is that one of the main facilities for women to give birth and children to receive treatment has now been destroyed," he says....
The borders have to be established to make the civil war aggression worthless. Attacks on hospitals is no mistake, it is a strategy to drive people out of the city. The aggression has to be ended. The borders where the rebels hold land has to be set by UN resolution. Assad cannot go on to believe such actions will result in more and more territory for his possession.
Aleppo is not a goal in itself, (click here) but territorial gains are limited to the aim of fragmenting the opposition forces before any political settlement is reached. The regime and its allies know that it would be impossible to defeat the armed oppositions and reclaim all the Syrian territory.
They have opted for a strategy which isolates rebel-held areas from one another. By consigning the opposition to “islands”- isolated pockets of rebel-held territory surrounded by regime-held territory - the regime makes opposition forces vulnerable to repression and siege and dependent on regime allies to access further humanitarian supplies.
This strategy is systematic and coordinated at the highest levels within the regime. A military headquarters, called the United Center of Operation for the North, is managing a variety of regime-affiliated forces, including militias led by regime figures and Iranian advisers. It leads operations in Idlib, Aleppo and the north of Latakia, with the help of Russian air strikes....
...Apart from Aleppo being the largest city in Syria and the economic capital, whose recapturing would be of a military and psychological significance, liberating this particular city would be a boost to the Syrian government’s popular legitimacy. The people of Aleppo, who are predominantly Sunni, had stubbornly refused to get dragged into the “revolution” and, as a consequence, have suffered a lot. Therefore, a win in Aleppo would not only vindicate their steadfastness and sacrifices, but would be a win against the alternative project that is backed by regional players.
A win for the government in Aleppo would convince the armed rebellion that its fall is not imminent. People on the opposition side would be bound to ask questions on the sanity of continuing a fight and a suffering with no achievable goal on the horizon, which should lead to them attending the negotiations table with more realistic demands....
