The largest and most important hospital in opposition-held Northwest Syria might be closed down by the end of September, 2024 due to a lack of funding, leaving more than 1.7 million people without access to essential healthcare services. The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) needs urgent support to keep this vital medical facility open for the children, women, and men who depend on it for survival.
Bab al-Hawa Hospital, located close to the Turkish border, provides an irreplaceable lifeline for displaced people from all over the country, who were rendered destitute and forced to flee due to indiscriminate violence by the Assad regime. It serves as the main health facility for all critical cases in the last enclave still held by Syria’s armed opposition, whose population has tripled in recent years due to a vast number of people from all over the country fleeing from the Assad regime’s genocidal violence.
This hospital is the only one providing comprehensive medical services for people living in rebel-held Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia–the sort that people in developed nations take for granted whenever they experience illness or injury.
Syrians who live in this area only have Bab al-Hawa Hospital when they are wounded by intermittent, indiscriminate bombing by the regime as well as traffic or workplace accidents and natural disasters such as the earthquakes that devastated the region in February, 2023. This is the only place where they can receive testing and treatment for chronic illnesses, including cancer and diabetes. No other facility within reach has “six operating rooms, adult, pediatric, and neonatal Intensive Care Units (ICUs), and nine specialty outpatient medical clinics,” offering a, “wide range of specialty medical and surgical services.”
More than ten thousand patients are treated at the hospital every month for everything ranging from general surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, vascular surgery, pediatric and neonatal surgery to outpatient cardiology, urology, ophthalmology, dialysis, and colonoscopy. It houses the largest blood bank in Northwest Syria and an average of 4,000 people per month are admitted to the emergency department alone for trauma care.
This is not the first time Bab al-Hawa Hospital has been pushed to the brink due to lack of support. A majority of food, medicine, and other critical aid flows through a nearby border crossing that has been subject to frequent, oftentimes arbitrary closures by Turkish authorities since 2021. These closures have especially impacted people in need of medical treatment, who have sometimes gone to the hospital only to be given a prescription but no medication due to periodic shortages.
It is increasingly difficult to find an adequate hospital anywhere in Syria nowadays due to decades of destructive warfare and a worsening humanitarian crisis making life more difficult in every corner of the country. All types of medical facilities, from hospitals built before 2011 to makeshift operating rooms hidden in apartments, basements, and tunnels, have been directly targeted for bombing by the Assad regime, aided by Russian air and artillery forces. Targeting hospitals and ambulances for destruction–indiscriminately killing doctors, nurses, paramedics, and volunteer medics, as well as the patients they were attempting to save–is an egregious violation of international law, an attack on civilian populations in contested areas.
The United Nations at one point tried to reduce the attacks on hospitals in Syria by sharing the location of several hospitals in opposition-held territory with Russia, a “no-strike list” that any civilized nation would have recognized and implemented to reduce civilian casualties. This initiative proved short-lived after Russian and Syrian government forces used the coordinates provided by the UN to target hospitals more accurately, adding to more than 500 confirmed attacks on healthcare facilities across Syria since 2011.
Life has consistently become more difficult for everyone living in every corner of Syria, despite the significant decrease in active hostilities since 2019, with a majority of critical infrastructure still destroyed and an economy that remains a shadow of its pre-war self. More than 16.7 million people, three quarters of the current population, currently depend on international aid to meet their daily needs. Lack of access to electricity, clean water, and cooking oil impacts their ability to prepare and store painfully expensive food and medicine, increasing the risk of chronic and infectious disease among Syrians suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
The country’s worsening humanitarian crisis has stretched the few remaining health facilities to their absolute limit, exemplified by COVID-19’s impact on Syria. Understaffed and underequipped hospitals quickly ran out of beds, oxygen tanks, and ventilators at the height of the pandemic. Test kits, medicine, and vaccines were slow to arrive while the disease spread like wildfire through a population whose immune system had already been weakened by years of deprivation.
Living conditions in Northwest Syria are particularly dire while a majority reside in overcrowded internally displaced person (IDP) camps that provide at best a minimal amount of food, water, and shelter from the elements.
Various diseases run rampant in the camps despite the best efforts of displaced people and aid organizations to control their spread, including a polio outbreak that required international assistance to eradicate. More recently several hundred cases of cholera were reported in Syria and neighboring Lebanon after contaminated groundwater was used for drinking and crop irrigation. Displaced Syrians also suffer from higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, measles, meningitis, and hepatitis A, as well as kidney dysfunction and gallstones related to drinking over-chlorinated water–tragic side-effects of efforts to protect themselves from water-borne contagions. Leishmaniasis, scabies, and other skin diseases are also common in IDP camps while amputations from diabetes and other untreated chronic conditions have become more common than disabilities caused by war injuries.
These horrific daily afflictions make Bab al-Hawa Hospital all the more important to residents of Northwest Syria, especially after dozens of smaller hospitals and medical facilities in Idlib have closed in recent years.
The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) has funded Bab al-Hawa Hospital since 2018 and needs urgent support in order to keep it open for the people who desperately rely on it. But a sudden drop in donations over the last six months has jeopardized their ability to maintain funding for the hospital.
Readers can click this link if they wish to donate to SAMS and help keep Bab al-Hawa Hospital in operation for the 1.7 million people who rely on it as their one and only source of critical healthcare.
Update 9/15/2024: Select "Syria Medical Programs" in the "Choose Program to Support" section.
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