ALEPPO: An air strike and artillery fire hit the two largest hospitals in rebel-held parts of Syria’s Aleppo on Wednesday, in what rights groups said was a deliberate strategy of targeting civilian infrastructure.
President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his ally Moscow have carried out a barrage of air strikes on opposition-controlled eastern Aleppo since Syria’s regime announced a bid last week to retake all of the divided city.
The latest bombardment of the city has been some of the worst in Syria’s five-year civil war, and comes after the failure of a short-lived ceasefire brokered by Russia and the United States earlier this month.
The two hospitals were struck just before dawn, with the M10 facility hit in an air strike and the M2 facility hit with artillery fire, said Adham Sahloul of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which supports both hospitals.
The attacks put both facilities temporarily out of commission and left only six hospitals operational in the eastern parts of the city, Sahloul said, calling the attacks “deliberate”. Sahloul warned of devastating consequences if the hospitals remain closed and violence spiked as it did with heavy strikes over the weekend. “With these two hospitals gone, if today there is another offensive like Saturday or Sunday, this is signing the death warrant for hundreds of people,” he said.
The WHO on Tuesday warned that medical facilities in the city’s east were on the verge of “complete destruction”.
The UN body called for “an immediate establishment of humanitarian routes to evacuate sick and wounded from the eastern part of the city.” More than 170 people have been killed in east Aleppo since Syria’s army announced its operation to retake the city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
Published in Dawn September 29th, 2016