Russia is bombing Syria’s children: Targeting medical facilities

In November, Mohammed Katoub entered Syria for the first time in years. It was part of his job as chief protection officer for the Syrian-American Medical Society. But he didn’t tell his wife. He didn’t want to spook her. She knew how often medical facilities in Syria were struck by Russian and regime air strikes.

Katoub, once a mild-mannered Damascus dentist, figured he would be safe during the three-day excursion, where he was to hold a series of workshops for medical workers in a town in northern Idlib. But as luck would have it, his trip coincided with Turkey’s downing of a Russian plane. 

He was teaching the doctors and nurses about sexual violence against women when the Russian airstrikes began. A missile landed 400 meters away from the clinic, one of more than 100 care points and medical centers operated by the organization inside Syria. “I was explaining the difference between rape and sexual assault,” he remembers. “We ran into the streets because it is much safer than inside a facility.”

The clinic director ordered all patients and all staff except for emergency personnel home. As the shift changed, with some heading to Turkey and some coming back, a grim mood settled in. “They all said goodbye as if they would never see each other again,” he said, sitting in his organization’s office in Gaziantep.

For the small and dedicated core of mostly Syrian professionals providing health care and humanitarian services to those inside Syria, the Russian intervention has made an already hellish situation even more difficult. Katoub’s group has counted 300 attacks on its medical facilities since the conflict began, with the numbers of wounded and the logistical challenges increasing dramatically since the Russian intervention began. Since Sept. 30 they’ve had an attack every two days on a medical facility, double the number of previous months, said Katoub.