“The situation is indescribable and we are alone,” says a Syrian doctor

The earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last week has already killed 35,000 people

“A week after the earthquakes, we still have not received any outside help. The situation is indescribable and we are alone. The speaker is Moheed Kaddour, director of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Atmeh, Syria, who strives to help save as many lives as possible in overcrowded hospitals and international aid is not forthcoming.

It has been a week since one of the worst earthquakes ever hit Turkey and Syria. A magnitude 7.8 quake has killed more than 35,000 so far, according to the latest estimates. The towns have been reduced to rubble, ruins and a flurry of people trying to find their relatives, friends or neighbors who were trapped in the rubble or injured in some of the overcrowded hospitals in the affected areas.

“Those affected have nothing at all. We only know that the hospitals are full of wounded and dead and the needs are enormous,” said Mohammad Darwish, deputy director of the MSF hospital in Atmeh, confirming that the situation is “catastrophic” and of which there are is still not a “clear picture” of what happened.

Before the earthquakes, the Bab al-Hawa was the only border crossing point for international humanitarian aid from Turkey to this landlocked region. But aid is still not coming to Syria. It is still the only open pass, taking into account that it has been partially or completely closed for days. Therefore, the Organization, which is active in Syria, launched an emergency plan to support hospitals and provide medical and material assistance in the area.

“We received 800 people in the emergency department in the first few days, 250 of whom required surgical treatment. Even this past weekend, the wounded continued to pour in. Since then, sadly, the window for survivors to continue appearing in the rubble has closed and the number of critically injured people we have treated has declined dramatically,” said Samih Kaddour, director of Aqrabat Hospital, which specializes in orthopedic and reconstructive surgery. that MSF provided them with supplies at a time when all hospitals were “overwhelmed, including ours.”

But to deal with the drama that unfolded, Mohammad Zaitoun, a surgeon at the MSF hospital in Atmeh, was transferred to a few kilometers from the border with Turkey, where the inability to get outside help or transfer the injured put them in a “very complicated” situation. “We were overwhelmed,” he says when he compares the experienced situation to some moments of heavy bombing during the war. “Rarely have we seen such an influx of injured people.”

Therefore, they launched the ambulance network that exists in Atmeh Hospital, both to transfer patients to different hospitals and to transfer people who have become homeless to meeting places. But the situation is still not improving.

Source: La Verdad

Michael

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