Updated by Jennifer Williams @jenn_ruth jennifer@vox.com Sep 22, 2016, 3:00p
One of the most disturbing features of the war in Syria — and there are many, many disturbing features of the war in Syria — has been the repeated attacks on medical facilities and personnel by Russian and Syrian government forces. The nonprofit advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights has called it “the worst campaign against health care anywhere in the world in recent memory.”
The latest attack came Wednesday, when four medical workers were reportedly killed and a nurse critically injured in an airstrike on a medical clinic in a village near the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims the strike was carried out by either Syrian or Russian warplanes.
This attack follows on the heels of a massive bombing of a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy on Monday that killed one aid worker and approximately 20 civilians, and destroyed at least 18 of the 31 aid trucks. US intelligence officials believe Russian forces carried out that airstrike.
Those attacks have been the rule, not the exception. There have been 382 attacks on medical facilities in Syria between March 2011, when the Syrian civil war began, and June 2016, according to data collected by Physicians for Human Rights. Of those strikes, at least 344 — or 90 percent — were conducted by Syrian government forces or Russian forces fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. These forces have also killed over 700 medical personnel in Syria, according to the group’s statistics.
“When you kill a doctor you don’t just kill them,” Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights, told Reuters’s Helen Coster. “You destroy the lives of people they could have saved.”
Had there been just a few medical facilities bombed here and there over the course of the five-year war, one could perhaps be persuaded to believe those were just tragic accidents. But when you get into the triple digits, that excuse just doesn’t fly.
Numbers that large mean the only explanations are that the medical facilities are being inadvertently hit by the Syrian and Russian warplanes carpet bombing much of the country — or that they’re being deliberately targeted.
And, in fact, the UN independent inquiry commission on Syria stated in a report earlier this month that “[t]he pattern of attacks [by the Syrian regime], and in particular the repeated bombardments, strongly suggests that there has been deliberate and systematic targeting of hospitals and other medical facilities during this reporting period.”
Targeting hospitals and medical facilities is prohibited under international humanitarian law. So why are these attacks still happening? The answer is twofold: The attacks are effective, and the Russian and Syrian governments know they can get away with them.
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