AL-NAYRAB, Syria: For years, Syria’s civil war has been a largely frozen conflict, the country effectively carved up into areas controlled by the Damascus government of President Bashar Assad, various opposition groups and Syrian Kurdish forces.
But as the conflict entered its 14th year on Friday, observers say violence has been on the rise again while the world’s attention is mostly focused on other crises, such as Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
In the village of Al-Nayrab in the northwestern, opposition-held enclave of Idlib, Ali Al-Ahmad burns olive branches in a stove to keep his partially destroyed house warm.
He has been living in the damaged house, struck in a recent round of shelling by government forces. It’s in better condition than many of the surrounding houses that were reduced to rubble, he says. When a new round of bombing starts, he leaves for a while to stay in one of the nearby displacement camps until the situation calms and he can return and repair the damage.
“We return for a day or two, then they start shelling us,” he said. “We leave for a few days, then return to our village to find our homes destroyed.”
The UN-backed body known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said this week that since October, the country has seen the worst wave of violence since 2020.
The war, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million, began as peaceful protests against Assad’s government in March 2011.
The protests — part of the Arab Spring popular uprisings that spread across much of the Middle East that year — were met by a brutal crackdown, and the revolt quickly spiraled into a full-blown civil war, which was further complicated by the intervention of foreign forces on all sides of the conflict, as well as a rising militancy, first by Al-Qaeda-linked groups and then the Daesh group until its defeat in 2019.
Russia, along with Iran, became Assad’s biggest ally in the war, Turkiye backed an array of Syrian opposition groups while the United States supported Syrian Kurdish forces in the fight against Daesh. Israel has carried out airstrikes targeting the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria.
Over the years, the battlefields became stalemated in the war-ravaged nation.
The recent surge in violence began with a drone strike on a military academy graduation ceremony in government-held city of Homs in October that killed dozens.
Syrian government and allied Russian forces then launched a bombardment of the opposition-held northwest that hit “well-known and visible hospitals, schools, markets and camps for internally displaced persons,” the commission said.
Elsewhere, increasingly frequent Israeli strikes targeted Iran-linked targets in government-held parts of Syria — attacks that sometimes also hit civilians. Turkiye stepped up its attacks on US-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, while militants from Daesh sleeper cells have launched sporadic attacks in different parts of the country.
In recent weeks, opposition-held areas have also seen unrest, with protests breaking out in Idlib against the leadership of the Al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group that governs the area.
With all the multiple and complex layers of the conflict, there is no resolution of the crisis in sight for Syria.
David Carden, the UN’s Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria crisis, said during a recent visit to northwest Syria that the UN’s humanitarian response plan for 2023, which had appealed for more than $5 billion, only received 38 percent of the funds sought — the lowest level since the United Nations started issuing the appeals.
“There are 4.2 million people in need in northwest Syria, and 2 million of those are children,” of whom 1 million are not going to school, he said. “This is a lost generation.”
Compounding Syria’s misery was the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, that killed more than 59,000 people in Turkiye and Syria. Some 6,000 of them were were killed in Syria alone, mainly in the northwest, where most of the 4.5 million people rely on humanitarian aid to survive.
United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations have been struggling to fund programs that provide a lifeline in Syria, blaming donor fatigue, the COVID-19 pandemic, and conflicts elsewhere that have erupted in recent years.
The UN’s World Food Program, which estimates that over 12 million Syrians lack regular access to food, announced in December that it would stop its main assistance program in Syria in 2024.
Violence in Syria is on the rise while aid is flagging as the civil war enters its 14th year
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Violence in Syria is on the rise while aid is flagging as the civil war enters its 14th year
- As the conflict entered its 14th year on Friday, observers say violence has been on the rise again
- The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said this week that since October, the country has seen the worst wave of violence since 2020
Sudan hospital welcomes first patients after war forced it shut
- The Bahri Teaching Hospital, which, before the conflict, treated around 800 patients a day in its emergency department, was repeatedly attacked and looted
KHARTOUM: At a freshly renovated hospital in Khartoum, the medical team is beaming: Nearly three years after it was wrecked and looted in the early days of Sudan’s war, the facility has welcomed its first patients.
The Bahri Teaching Hospital in the capital’s north was stormed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, soon after fighting broke out between the RSF and Sudan’s army.
Bahri remained a war zone until an army counteroffensive pushed through Khartoum last year, recapturing the area from the RSF in March.
FASTFACT
Around 40 of Khartoum’s 120 hospitals, shut during the war, have resumed operations, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Network, a local medical group.
“We never thought the hospital would reopen,” said Dr. Ali Mohammed Ali, delighted to be back in his old surgical ward.
“It was completely destroyed; there was nothing left,” he said. “We had to start from scratch.”
Ali fled north from Khartoum in the early days of the war, working in a makeshift medical camp with “no gloves, no instruments, and no disinfectant.”
According to the World Health Organization, the conflict has forced the shutdown of more than two-thirds of Sudan’s health facilities and caused a world record number of deaths from attacks on health care infrastructure.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed across Sudan since the war began, while 11 million have been left displaced, triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis.
But with the RSF now driven out of Khartoum, Sudan’s government is gradually returning, and the devastated city is starting to rebuild.
Around 40 of Khartoum’s 120 hospitals, shut during the war, have resumed operations, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Network, a local medical group.
The Bahri Teaching Hospital, which, before the conflict, treated around 800 patients a day in its emergency department, was repeatedly attacked and looted.
“All the equipment was stolen,” said director Galal Mostafa, adding that about 70 percent of its buildings were damaged and the power system was destroyed.
“We were fortunate to receive two transformers just days ago,” said Salah Al-Hajj, the hospital’s chief executive.
During the first five days of fighting, Al-Hajj — an affable man with a sharp grey moustache — was trapped inside one wing of the hospital.
“We couldn’t leave because of the heavy gunfire,” he said, saying that anyone “who stepped outside risked being detained and beaten” by the RSF.
Patients were rushed to
safety in dangerous transfers to hospitals away from the fighting across the Nile.
“Vehicles had to take very complicated routes to evacuate patients safely, avoiding shells and bullets,” Al-Hajj said. On April 15, 2023, as the first shots rang out in the capital, RSF fighters seized Ali on his way into surgery.
They held him for two weeks at Soba, an RSF-run detention center in southern Khartoum whose former inmates have shared testimony of torture and inhumane conditions.
“When I was released, the country was in ruins,” he said.
Hospitals were “destroyed, streets devastated, and homes looted. There was nothing left.”
Almost three years on, taxis now drop patients at the hospital’s entrance, while new ambulances sit parked in a courtyard that until recently was strewn with rubble and overgrown weeds.
Inside, refurbished corridors smell of fresh paint.
The renovations and new equipment were funded by the Sudanese American Physicians Association and Islamic Relief USA at a cost of more than $2 million, according to the association.
Services have resumed in newly fitted emergency, surgical, obstetrics, and gynaecology rooms.
Doctors, nurses, and administrators hustle through the halls, the administrators fretting over covering salaries and running costs.
“Now it’s much better than before the war,” said Hassan Alsahir, a 25-year-old intern in the emergency department.
“It wasn’t this clean before, and we were short on beds — sometimes patients had to sleep on the floor.”
On its first day reopened, the hospital received a patient from the Kordofan region — the war’s current major battleground — for urgent surgery.
“The operation went well,” said Ali.
