AMMAN, Jordan (CNS) – Only a small number of civilians in Aleppo are using humanitarian corridors to flee weeks of intensive bombardment; activists say people do not trust that the routes are safe.
Sonia Khush, who directs Save the Children Syria, told Catholic News Service (CNS) that civilians trapped inside the city’s eastern neighborhoods have experienced bombing that has destroyed homes and hospitals, leaving children crippled and dead.
She recounted a story from a staffer at a partner agency at the scene of an airstrike, where children were buried beneath the rubble.
“A child less than 10 years old ran to me shouting, ‘Sir, please put my arm back.’ His left arm was amputated and he held it with his right hand. He was begging me to put it back, and this is only one of so many tragedies that we see,” the aid worker said.
“He described life in East Aleppo like living on the edge of an active volcano,” Khush told CNS in the Jordanian capital. “You never know when you are going to die. It just keeps getting harder and harder and more dangerous and more dangerous.”
About 200,000 to 300,000 people are believed to be in East Aleppo. No food, humanitarian assistance, or medical aid have been able to reach the rebel-held territory for several weeks due to the intense military onslaught and siege. Syrian government troops are aided by Russian air power and Iranian-controlled militias.
Syrian rebels launched an offensive at the end of July in a bid to break the government’s siege of East Aleppo. The U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, recently warned that basic supplies in East Aleppo could run out in three weeks.
Khush told CNS that, in the last week of July, six health facilities were bombed in the city.
“With the bombing, small field hospitals meant to support five or six critical patients at a time now receive 40 or 50 patients.
Imagine the scene of people being treated in the doorways, on the floors, and the enormous stress that the health care providers are under,” Khush said. “It’s a very difficult situation for them.”
“The world cannot turn its back while children are bombed and then denied medical treatment,” Khush told CNS. “They are running out of supplies to be able to do things like surgeries that are needed. It’s a very critical situation.”
Save the Children estimates that Syrian children make up 35 percent of the casualties in Aleppo. It has called for a permanent cease-fire to be put into place.
In early July, the Aleppo office of the Catholic international aid group, Caritas, was hit by a grenade, killing one, injuring passersby and causing extensive damage.
“It is particularly tragic that the person killed was a patient of the Caritas medical project,” Stefan Maier, Middle East coordinator of Caritas Austria, said after his recent visit. Elsewhere cease-fires are maintained, but not in Aleppo, Maier told the Austrian Kathpress news agency.
“Pickup trucks constantly drive past the Caritas office, and the loading surfaces in the back are packed with the injured or dead, most of them children,” Maier said.