Т Паркер - Swift Vengeance

The Doctors Without Borders website had reported in May of 2015 that one of their MSF — Médecins Sans Frontières — “field” hospitals, located in the Farafra neighborhood of Aleppo, had been hit by drone-fired missiles on April 22. Nine dead: two doctors, three nurses, four volunteers. Details were few, because IH-One was a very small improvised hospital consisting of three inflatable sterile operating rooms and ten beds tucked back into the bowels of a cave. Because the government of Assad considered Doctors Without Borders to be enemies of the state, said the news release, no MSF personnel were allowed in the Syrian Arab Republic. An enterprising photographer had managed to smuggle out a brief video of the aftermath of the missile blasts: fire, smoke, the twisted carnage of bodies and body parts, what looked like a motorcycle tire poking out of the rubble. I watched it four times, concentrating on every detail I could take in.

The report continued:

The target of the attack appears to have been Zkrya Gourmat, a French-born suspected Islamic State leader. IS has exponentially increased its numbers during Syria’s three-year civil war. The group has imposed strict sharia law in the eastern, rebel-held half of Aleppo. As the civil war escalates, Syrian, Russian, and Coalition air strikes are increasingly replacing the so-called “targeted” coalition drone missions. Coalition drone strikes have resulted in civilian deaths, but the numbers of collateral casualties are disputed.

MSF-supported field hospitals such as IH-One have become necessary in Syria because the Assad regime has tortured and executed 120 Syrian doctors, 50 nurses, and 65 medical aid workers since late 2011. Over four hundred Syrian doctors have been imprisoned.

Both of the physicians and all three of the nurses killed just outside IH-One were Syrian. The four dead humanitarian workers were from France, Germany, Italy, and Syria. Names have been withheld pending notifications, according to MSF policy.

I found another article about IH-One on the Physicians for Human Rights website, based on the MSF release. No new information.

And another piece from NPR, in which two IH-One volunteers were interviewed. Little more.

But what struck me was how little. There was a short, back-page Washington Post report based on the MSF release but not published until June 15. A similar piece was published in The New York Times the next day. I found a Los Angeles Times feature on the White Helmet volunteers in Syria, one of whom cited the drone attack on an Aleppo field hospital in 2015 as one of his inspirations for doing humanitarian work at the risk of his own life.

I changed the search words to “Syria field hospitals,” with little variation in the results.

Then to “Syria makeshift hospitals,” but the same thirty-plus pages of entries kept coming up.

I spent some time on the Doctors Without Borders website, but even their coverage of IH-One in Aleppo ended with the May 2015 posting. It was easy to see that small, makeshift, improvised IH-One — supported but never staffed by Doctors Without Borders personnel — had been figuratively buried by the brutal government siege of Aleppo that began less than a year later. The suffering and deaths of so many people at the hands of their own government had commanded the attention of the world for nearly three months, finally upstaged in the United States by the election of Donald Trump. I thought back to those dark months, the only light I could come up with being the Cubs breaking their eighty-one-year World Series drought in seven dramatic games.

I shrugged and sipped the booze.

By the end of 2016, IH-One had been literally buried and forgotten.

I stood and stretched and went to the window again. Lindsey was gone and the lights in her casita were on. I wondered if maybe she’d gotten snack food on her market run, or orange juice, or maybe energy drinks. Maybe a nice bag of brown potatoes. What was wrong with wishful thinking?

The barn lights were on, too, indicating Dale Clevenger and maybe Burt. By my casual estimate, Burt slept four hours a day.

Back at the computer I stared at the monitor until the screensaver came on. Rubbed my eyes and yawned. Considered another drink but told the bartender I was fine.

Bring this story to life, I thought. The living have their versions — but what about the dead?

What would they say?

You don’t even know their names.

I wanted names.

I wanted faces.

The Doctors Without Borders page had declined to publish names, nor had other mentions of the attack identified the victims. I went back to the links at the ends of the articles I’d printed, but nothing looked promising.

Change it up, I thought. Come at it another way.

I found mountains of government statistics of both military and civilian deaths in the Syrian Arab Republic. I narrowed to “air strike deaths” and found numbers but not names. I narrowed again to “drone strike deaths” and found the same. I bored an even smaller hole: “medical workers dead in Aleppo,” which took me back to the Doctors Without Borders releases.

The Free Syria group had its own version of the drone strike outside IH-One, but it listed none of the dead by name. Again, victims’ nationalities — Syrian, French, German, and Italian — were noted. Then something caught my eye, a link hidden in a thicket of them at the end of a Free Syria release:

Martyr Statistics — Published by the Syrian Revolution Martyr Database http://syrianshuhada.com.

I hit the translate button and watched English replace the Arabic writing.

On the home page was a map of Syria and a “martyr count” by province. The site listed a staggering 151,888 martyrs killed in Syria through April of 2016 — before the bloody siege of Aleppo. I thought about that number for a moment, knowing that the number of Syrians forced to leave their homes was many times more.

On the left side of the home page was a long table of contents. My heart sped up:

MARTYR COUNTS BY GENDER

MARTYR COUNTS BY CIVILIAN/MILITARY

MARTYR COUNTS BY PROVINCE OF DEATH

MARTYR COUNTS BY CITY OF BIRTH

MARTYR COUNTS BY NATIONALITY

STATISTICS OF CHILDREN MARTYRS

STATISTICS OF FEMALE MARTYRS

STATISTICS OF MARTYRS FROM CHEMICAL AIR BOMBING

And on and on. I clicked on “Martyr Counts by Week,” found that forty-four civilians had died in the city of Aleppo the week of 4/24/2015. Of these, eighteen had died in “Bombardment by air.”

Next I went to “Martyr Counts in Aleppo City by Neighborhood” and found that Farafra — home of humble IH-One — had been the neighborhood of death for nine martyrs the week that the Headhunters had drawn down on Zkrya Gourmat.

My heart sped up, solid and eager.

On a separate sheet of paper I wrote down their Martyr ID numbers, then began in alphabetical order.

Monique Alaly was a twenty-two-year-old French woman with a black hijab and a winning smile. She was listed as a volunteer medical worker. A short video showed her in a classroom, teaching science to a roomful of girls.

Mhood Amin was a Syrian doctor. Male, no age given and no picture or video.

Ibrahim Azmeh was a forty-nine-year-old Syrian doctor with a sharp, ascetic face and straight black hair. In his video, the doctor sat in an outdoor café in what looked like Damascus, smoking a cigarette and looking calmly at the camera.

Noor Mofq was a forty-year-old Syrian nurse, female, no photo or video.