Syrian Rescue and Survival

"[We have received dozens of calls from people all over the world wanting to adopt baby Aya]."

"I won't allow anyone to adopt her now. Until her distant family return, I'm treating her like one of my own."

Hospital Manager, Khalid Attiah

 

"The rescuers can end up being victims too because of how unstable the building is."

"We just pulled three bodies out of this rubble and we think there is a family in there that is still alive - we will keep on working."

Mohammed al-Kamel, White Helmets rescue group, Jindayris, Syria

Rescuers from the White Helmets organisation, who are all too familiar with pulling people out of the rubble for over a decade during Syria's civil war, have been helping in Jindayris.Getty Images

 

 A newborn child, umbilical cord still attached to her dead mother, was found alive by members of the Syrian rescue group White Helmets and taken to hospital for care. "She arrived on Monday in such a bad state, she had bumps, bruises, she was cold and barely breathing", the paediatrician looking after her, Hani Marouf explained. In other circumstances, baby Aya would have four siblings to play with and grow up with. All four perished along with their mother and father. When the earthquake struck Aya's mother went into labour and gave birth; she may never even have seen her baby daughter before dying.

A lot of publicity surrounded this child; the video of her rescue was posted to social media resulting in a response from people all over the world, offering help, many wanting to adopt the child whose name in Arabic means "a sign from God". One of the nurses at the hospital treating the baby aroused suspicion when he was seen photographing the tiny girl.The hospital manager whose wife was breastfeeding Aya thought the male nurse might be planning to abduct the baby, so he fired the nurse.

Before long the nurse returned along with two thugs with guns who set about beating the hospital director. The gunmen informed local police officers they intended to punish the hospital director for firing their friend, with no interest in kidnapping the baby. False claims of being relatives to the baby have been made by people showing up at the hospital, indicating a need for a police guard. In fact, a close relative, her great-uncle has stated that the baby's paternal aunt plans to raise the baby together with her own she recently gave birth to.

 

Getty Images

 

Ten hours after the February 6 quake struck, rescue workers in Jindera in Syria's north discovered the baby while digging through the rubble of a five-storey apartment building where her parents lived. She has been cared for at the hospital in Afrin ever since. Dozens of housing units in the town of Jinderis were destroyed. Her father, originally from a village in eastern Deir el Zour province, left it when the village was captured by the Islamic State group.

Many of the towns and cities where millions lived were reduced to fragments of concrete and twisted metal following the initial quake, another almost as strong, and a series of tremors striking southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Over a week following the disaster hundreds of thousands have been left homeless and struggling to find the basics required to sustain life; shelter, warmth, food, water, medical attention. The brutal winter weather itself represents a danger to sustained life for the survivors.

 

Moving aid into the large area impacted by the tremblors in Syria is hampered by the difficulty in access to crossings into the area as a result of the 12-year civil war where millions of Syrian Sunnis fled to escape the assaults by the Syrian regime's military. Aid agencies have found it difficult to deliver life-saving winter clothing, food and potable water. The Turkish military is still bombing Kurds nearby the disaster zone in Syria. There are warring factions nearby, including Islamic State.

 

People desperate for aid in Syria in difficult-to-reach areas still have received nothing. In Turkey survivors have been put up temporarily in rail cars. In northwest Syria, 190 families sleep on the floor of a basketball court in Afrin, lying on mats used for training. Children are wrapped in blankets and sleep on the court floor, some of them becoming ill from conditions of privation. Local officials are awaiting the delivery of tents.

 

The United Nations reached an agreement with Damascus to deliver aid through two more border crossings from Turkey to rebel-held areas of northwest Syria. A $397 million appeal for "desperately needed, life-saving relief for nearly 5 million Syrians" for three months has been launched by the United Nations. 

People walk past collapsed buildings on Thursday in the town of Jinderis, in Syria's Aleppo province, days after a massive earthquake devastated the region. Ghaith Alsayed/AP

 

 

S.O.S. Save Our Souls! Is There No One There???

"I last spoke with the boat's captain on December 18 and he told me that at least 17 people on board had died due to a lack of food and water."

"They have only been able to drink water when it rains."

"Please tell me, I just want to know if my family is alive or dead. We all want to see our families, that is all we request from the world. Just help us."

Sham Shur Alom, Rohingya refugee in Malaysia

"Several reports indicate dozens of people have already died during this ordeal, while survivors are hungry and thirsty without access to food and water and suffering from sickness."

United Nations' refugee agency 

"Father, please send a boat or I will jump into the ocean. I can't tolerate the pain and struggle anymore. There is no food or water to drink. People are drinking salt water. People are close to dying and mental breakdown. They're going to bite each other."

"Baba. I don't know why I am here. My teeth are dry from the lack of drinking water. Please do whatever is humanly possible for you."

Mosharrof Ullha, to his father Ata Ullha, Rohingya, Cox's Bazar Refugee Camp, Bangladesh

"We urge the Government of India to urgently coordinate and cooperate with other regional governments on the search and rescue operations of Rohingya refugees who are currently stranded in Indian waters with no medical support, food and water"    Amnesty India

The world of the unwanted homeless is ever on the move, hoping to find surcease from their stateless status, their unwanted presence, their suffering and their timeless dilemma. They aspire to live, to have a future, they are not economic migrants but refugees. As it happens, refugees who are Muslim, whom the Myanmar military expunged violently from the country where they were living. Originally from Bangladesh, the Rohingya lived for generations in Myanmar. But Buddhism and Islam oppose one another.

 

Living for years since their expulsion from Myanmar on the border in Bangladesh in an immense squalid refugee camp teeming with refugees whom no one wants responsibility for, there are those who dream of escape, of finding a new life and opportunity elsewhere in the world where they will be accepted, where human aspirations to belong and to succeed in life can be found. And in following that dream they sacrifice themselves to chance and fortune, and sometimes lose.

A boat stranded for close to three weeks in the Indian Ocean is desperate for rescue. So far a dozen of the Rohingya refugees populating the wooden craft open to the air, directionless, have died. With no humanitarian intervention from nearby nations fears are that more people will die in the next few days. And the unthinkable, that the  hopeful refugees on board will all perish from neglect by those who could mount a rescue. Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population globally has seen fit not to respond.

Predictably, India, with the world's third largest minority population of Muslims has no wish to acquire more people of the faith its own majority Hindu population is hostile to. Late November saw the open wooden boat set off from Bangladesh for Malaysia, yet another majority Muslim population, with over 150 asylum seekers aboard. On December 4 its engine failed, leaving the vessel to drift at sea, its food and water supplies steadily diminishing.

Most of the people on the ship had set out to meet family in Malaysia, anxious to flee the sprawling Cox's Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh with its hundreds of thousands of hopeless people languishing there for the past five years. The boat captain refused to allow those who have managed to make contact with the boat by satellite phone, to speak with their relatives. Open to the elements, conditions on the boat are unspeakably urgent.

The Indian navy and coast guard say no information about the adrift ship has reached them; wide-spread media coverage of the crisis aside. "We have no information about the issue",  a spokesperson for the Indian navy responded, to a query. To the present, it is believed that approximately two thousand Rohingya refugees have opted to risk a sea voyage in 2022 as conditions in the refugee camps both in Myanmar and Bangladesh continue to deteriorate.

Although Sri Lanka's navy rescued a boat of 104 Rohingya a week ago, other nations have no wish to encourage the mass flow of people by intervening to offer support. Bangladesh, the Muslim country from which the Rohingya originated has not seen fit to integrate them back into its society as a Muslim-to-Muslim responsibility. Nor have Indonesia or Malaysia recognized their religious responsibility to embrace fellow Muslims.

Rohingya refugees sit on a wooden boat as Indonesian officials conduct evacuation at the Krueng Geukueh port in Lhokseumawe, Aceh, Indonesia, on December 31, 2021.

Fachrul Reza / Xinhua via Getty Images

"Many more will die soon if they are not rescued, due to dehydration."

"We have approached the Indian coast guard and the Thai and Indonesian governments."

"None of them responded."

Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, Rohingya refugee, Cox's Bazar

Fearsome Desperation

"I love the U.K., I love the U.K. people. If they hear my sound, please take me, please evacuate me. I was your interpreter, I helped you, I served for you, but you don't care for me."

"I have just one message, please evacuate me, please take me, please pick me up from this place."

"I had a dispute with my wife. She told me 'We cannot stay more in Kabul, the U.K. doesn't care about you, they don't care about your children'."

former British Army interpreter

 

"It is difficult, we don't know when the wait [to be permitted into the Kabul airport for evacuation] will be over, and if the gate will open."

"Do you [journalist] know?"

Young Afghan boy anxious not to be named 

Thousands of people are scrambling to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban seized back control of the country, almost two decades after they were ousted by a US-led coalition. Getty Images

 

NATO-aligned nations all pledged their intention to evacuate Afghans who had helped their diplomats and their military as interpreters and aides at any time during the last twenty years when the U.S.-led coalition kept the Taliban at bay and went about investing huge sums of treasury and the lives of their military in leading the country to Democracy, to recognizing women's and minority rights, to building schools for girls and boys to receive an education, and clinics to provide basic health care. All the while the Taliban surged back each spring from their winter quarters in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Confident they were winning 'the hearts and minds' of the people, foreign NGOs installed themselves to help the country adjust to a new reality of freedom from enforced fundamentalist Islam under sharia law and Afghan women branched out from enforced burqa-wearing recluses to confident news anchors, beauty shop attendants, medical personnel and business owners. In rural areas the Taliban burned down the schools built for children's education by foreign elements.

Now, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the preferred formal title of the Taliban, has routed the elected government of Afghanistan in the shadows of the agreed-upon final drawdown of foreign troops and diplomats in the country. And Afghans who had worked in any capacity for the foreign military or foreign missions as well as for the Afghan government know they will be hunted down and murdered by the Taliban as traitors.

 

Afghans unable to enter the airport watch on as another evacuation flight leaves Kabul   Getty Images

 

Hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens are desperate to escape the return of the Taliban; some to save their lives, others to avoid living under their despotic, violent rule. The former British Army interpretor held out hope he and his family would be rescued, and then his hopes began slowly to wane and fade. Would-be refugees including the man, his wife and six children awaited rescue while queuing in a putrid ditch close to the airport, hoping they would be among those airlifted out of Kabul to foreign shores.

The ditch served as a human waste runway, and here people were directed to stand, the disgusting waste making children retch, their parents in despair as filth spilled through around them. No shelter, no food, no water, just the urgency of fear. People clutching documents; passports and visas, holding them high above the mess at their feet to keep them dry and viable. The feeble elderly placed in wheelbarrows to keep them above the foetid water but not safe from its nauseating stench.

While standing there in desperation people had little option but to add to the filth by defecating and urinating themselves into the sludge sliding past them. Childen were given pieces of cardboard to hold to shield hemselves from the sizzling sun. Many standing there sent messages to contacts in countries of the West pleading for help. The long queues led to where members of the British Army processed people, even with the awareness of the risk of a violent attack by the IS-KP terrorists.

 

Afghan families inside a US military aircraft wait for the plane's departure from Kabul airport   Getty Images

 

Former guards at the Australian embassy and their families queued for hours in the sewage canal only to be informed by soldiers standing on the wall above, that they lacked the correct visas. "The situation is unbelievable. People are jumping, falling off walls, there's shootings", one of the guards said. Two young girls were reportd to have been refused entry when their parents were allowed into the airport.

A man, Najibulla Alizadeh, posted a video. "They [the Taliban] hit me. I am Australian citizen" he said, blood pouring from his head. An armed man could be seen attempting to grab his phone, and then a gunshot was heard. And all was still. At the main airport entrance "red  units" of the Taliban on guard wearing militaryfatigues, pushed back people who they declared did not possess the necessary paperwork, enforced their leadership's declaration that Afghans will no longer be permitted to leave.

 

On Friday morning, New Zealand, Australia and Canada announced they were ending their airlift of Afghans out of the country. Not because they had completed their mission of rescuing all those they had promised they would not be abandoned to their fate, but rescued from the talons of the Taliban in recognition of the risks they took working for foreign powers. The Biden administration in the U.S. had adamantly refused all of its allies' requests to delay departure.

And then, on Friday, two deadly bombings took place at two airport entrance gates. Suicide bombers wering vests with detonating devices courtesy of Islamic State terrorists ensconced in Afghanistan killed a dozen U.S. Marines, close to 100 Afghan civilians awaiting the opportunity to leave their country, and wounding countless others.

Wounded people are taken to hospital after the blasts. Photograph: Reuters Tv/Reuters

Desperate to Leave Afghanistan

"While French commandos in buses got their people out, we sent texts [in English] telling our friends to head to the airport on their own. Ten buses screamed out of France's embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off."

"All of our allies had eyes and boots on the ground ... at Kabul's airport. Canada did not. It closed its embassy and withdrew all its diplomats and military by jet to Ottawa just as the Taliban was rolling into town."

Kevin Newman, journalist, former anchor, Global National

 

"I'm scared. Who knows, they could come here in the middle of the night and nobody is going to know anything. We could be executed, any day any time, any minute -- I can feel the death coming."

"The Taliban are driving around, staring at us, wondering what's going on here [at the hotel assigned to his family by the Canadian government, in Kabul while awaiting rescue]."

"Your government put us in the line of execution."

Abdul Ahmadullah, Kandahar native, awaiting rescue in Kabul 

"Abdul has worked on a daily basis, often on short notice, assisting in resolving issues both complex and urgent in nature."

"His family and country have reason to be proud of this fine young man."

Canadian military officers letter of commendation

 

"The security situation surrounding the airport has become increasingly dangerous. Violence has become more common and Taliban checkpoints in surrounding area are preventing many from reaching the airport area."

"For those who do make it ... Canadian Armed Forces members have been able to assist eligible evacuees to enter the airport parameter."

Unnamed senior government official

Afghans board a U.S. Air Force transport plane during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Sunday. Officials told media Monday that Canada's special forces are currently working inside and outside the confines of the airport to ensure Canadians and eligible Afghans can get onto planes destined for Canada. (U.S. Air Force/REUTERS)

 

 

Canadian military veterans who were assigned to tours of duty in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, as part of the Western allied forces led by the United States and NATO, have been extremely aware of the imminent danger their former Afghan colleagues would be exposed to. They have been working for months independently of government agencies to locate and contact former Afghan volunteers, interpreters and others working with the Canadian military for the ten years of its presence there.

That same group has desperately urged the Liberal Trudeau government to action, emphasizing the dire reality of a tragedy waiting to unfold. They have been frustrated at every turn. Agonizingly complex paperwork has confronted Afghans registering, proving their past work performance with the military, with the Canadian diplomatic mission as locally engaged employees and workers with Canadian NGOs. One department of government has shunted them off to another. During registration procedures communication lines freeze.

And it soon became distressingly evident that the Government of Canada had made up no contingency plans for evacuation of Afghans who were eventually successful in obtaining visas, much less those whose complex, often confusing paperwork had stalled. Finally, with the Taliban entrance to Kabul imminent, Canada yanked its diplomats out of Kabul and its military, sending them all back to Canada. And no one was left to aid and expedite the rescue of hundreds of Afghans promised evacuation by Canada. 

Messages sent directly from the Department of Foreign Affairs to the cellphones of the registered visa applicants and holders informed them they must make their own way to the airport for airlifting out of Afghanistan, at a time when the Taliban is manning checkpoints refusing to allow even visa holders entry to the airport. Canada prepared two transport planes to land at the Kabul airport and they returned half empty. People were simply unable to reach the airport, as ordered by an absent Canada.

 

More than 1,000 Afghans have been flown out on 12 Canadian flights thus far. Canadian Forces are not bringing people into this country without legitimate documentation, unlike the U.S. and U.K., says a former Afghan interpreter. CBC

 

Abdul Ahmadullah's plight is a case in point. Back in June the Canadian government responded to his need as a former interpreter for Canadian Forces in the knowledge that he was a marked man having worked for the Canadian combat mission Kandahar and he was forced into hiding while simultaneously the Taliban were searching for all Afghans linked to foreign forces. Others, like him interpreters, were found and murdered.

Ahmadullah had reached Kabul a month ago, with his family, waiting with dozens of other ex-employees locally engaged by Canada at downtown Kabul hotels until a flight could take them away. Their wait is interminable and they grow increasingly fearful in an atmosphere of grim suspense, where it has become impossible to reach the airport grounds much less make it inside, without assistance. Massive crowds of desperate Afghans and the presence of Taliban fighters surround the airport complex.

Some other countries working to extract their nationals and Afghans linked to them from Kabul and onto planes have taken people to the compound by helicopter, or with the use of armed convoys. The backstory is that interpreters' lives have been threatened by the Taliban and many assassinated by them. Ahmadullah had applied to emigrate to Canada back in 2011, when the Canadian mission left or as he put it "disappeared like ghosts".

Soon after the Canadians had departed Ahmadullah's young son, on his way home from school was abducted and he was contacted by someone representing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan inviting him to appear at a certain place, to see his son. "My wife told me, 'If you go there, both of you are going to die'." Instead, with the help of Pashtun elders he was able to negotiate a ransom for his son. Who came home badly beaten, missing two toenails. "You better run for your life, they're coming after you", warned one of the elders.

He, his wife and children moved every six months to new locations, attempting to change their appearance as they did -- for the next seven years. In June Kandahar was breached by the Taliban who killed all the officers manning the local police station, and took their place. The day of the invasion he appealed to Canadian officials and was wired $1,500. He and his family left for Kabul. In their absence from Kandahar their home was burnt to the ground.

When the Taliban took the capital on August 15, all those at the hotel they had been assigned to by the Canadian government were informed they should head out to the airport. When they did, they reached a dangerous place of mad chaos, packed with desperate people. They had little option but to return to the hotel to try again the following day, with similar results. Those in the hotel whom the Canadian government has pledged to rescue have tried again and again to reach the blast barriers of the airfield.

According to Ahmadullah, Taliban guards ripped up one former employee's Canadian visa then beat him. He was warned not to return or he'd be killed. "He didn't have hope any more", said Ahmadullah. He said, '[If we wait for Canada, we will die." The Canadian Armed Forces assigned to help extract Afghans has three to four days left to airlift people out of Kabul.

 

 U.S. President Joe Biden has informed his allies that the withdrawal date of August 31 is firm and will not be renegotiated with the Taliban. His concern now is that U.S. troops are vulnerable to attacks by Islamic State terrorists, obviating the potential of conflict with Taliban terrorists since the Taliban refer to August 31 as their 'red line' for foreign departures. And then there is their statement that they do not want any more Afghan nationals leaving on evacuation flights

Hoping to flee the country, people gather outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 20, 2021.   JIM HUYLEBROEK/The New York Times News Service

Venezuela's Political Medical Services

"There was oxygen, but they didn't let me use it [on elderly patients with heart failure urgently requiring oxygen]."
"I argued with my colleagues over and over. Yes, of course there was oxygen, but they didn't let me use it [to save a life if it was the life of an opposition supporter]."
"The theme was chronic illnesses, the ones where you would die if patients didn't get medicine, and that's how they [the Maduro administration] controlled people." 
"When the elections came, everything appeared: medicine, gas, dressings for bandages, injection serums."
Dr. Yansnier Arias, Cuban doctor working in Venezuela

"You arrived with vitamins and some pills for blood pressure [or the like]."
"And when you started to gain their [patients'] trust, you started the questions: 'Do you know where your voting place is?"
"Are you going to vote'?"
Dr. Carlos Ramirez, Cuban doctor assigned to work in Venezuela

"The Cuban government wants to make sure the Venezuelan regime survives and is willing to do anything in their power to support Maduro."
"It is unspeakable."
Jose Miguel Vivanco, director, Human Rights Watch Americas program

"They come to your house they ask you a series of questions, and you start to think, if I answer 'no', they can cut me from health care."
"It just leaves you overwhelmed."
Unidentified Venezuelan patient

A Cuban doctor treats a patient in Venezuela.

(Fernando Llano/AP)

Cuban doctors who were dispatched under Cuba's program of humanitarian aid to undeveloped and struggling countries to provide them with Cuba's famous 'barefoot doctors' program, set out at their country's behest to help the medically vulnerable, and many, with exposure to the corruption in Venezuela, have found it impossible to carry out their mission of providing optimum, unbiased and expert medical expertise to patients. Venezuela uses the cudgel of withholding care to any of its health-impaired citizens who fail to commit to supporting the Maduro administration.

For Dr. Hansnier Arias who had worked initially in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, sent there by the government of Cuba, one of thousands of doctors the socialist country routinely deploys in ties between other countries, knew his medical skills could help Venezuelans at a time that its medical system was beginning to collapse. It soon became obvious to him, however, that President Nicolas Maduro's intention was that not everyone would be treated.

When last May's national election was on the cusp, orders were that Maduro must win the vote, whatever the cost. And that cost meant that Maduro needed to ensure votes would come his way, so a dwindling food and medicine, and treatment supply was awarded supporters and denied opponents supporting the opposition. And that determination embroiled Cuba's international medical corps. The system so offended 16 members of the Cuban medical mission to Venezuela that they abandoned their positions.

Cuban doctors at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuba on November 23, 2018. REUTERS/Fernando Medina

Ordered to a door-to-door mission throughout impoverished neighbourhoods, the Cuban doctors were instructed to offer medicine to people and at the same time warn their patients that medical services would be cut should they choose not to vote for Mr. Maduro and his candidates. "These are the kinds of things you should never do in your life" a former Cuban supervisor stated under the condition of anonymity.

Dr. Ramirez, a dental surgeon, treated Venezuelans who had never had dental services ever before and revelled in his work in the country. And then came the order to spend weekends along with other medical workers handing out medicine and enlisting voters for the Socialist Party of Venezuela. Because of their abhorrence of this practise in manipulating people's human rights, those 16 Cuban medical personnel publicly revealed the Maduro practise of mixing medicine and politics.

Voters register with members of the ruling United Socialist Party before proceeding to a polling post to vote in presidential elections in Valencia, Venezuela, Sunday, May 20, 2018. (AP)

Health care in Venezuela, according to a new Constitution dated 1999, is considered a universal right. And with that recognition Venezuela turned to Cuba to launch medical missions in their country. Those missions to over 60 countries represent a proud tradition for Cuba and also a very remunerative one, gaining it an estimated $8 billion in cash over time. In Venezuela's case, their medical mission from Cuba was paid for with oil.

The doctors described an identification system named the "homeland card" which the Socialist Party used for entitlements to food subsidies and for voting id. Doctors were instructed to register people for the cards. The cards became a symbol to people of the government's heavy-handed control. That the use of the cards would enable the government to determine how they had voted and then restrict their food as retaliation.

One epileptic patient in the hospital who required treatment refused the homeland card, to Dr. Arias's recollection. She was then sent away without medication "Because she was from the opposition". Dr. Arias left Venezuela for Chile, where he plans to remain. He works now cleaning floors in a hospital since professional work as a doctor has eluded him. "If I can't be a doctor, I at least want to be a person", he declared.

"With [late President Hugo] Chavez it had been hard, but with Maduro, starting in 2013, it was worse."
"It became a form of blackmail: ‘You’re not going to have medicine. You’re not going to have free health care. You’re not going to have prenatal care if you’re a pregnant woman'."
Cuban doctor

Two weeks after 3-year-old Ashley Pacheco scraped her knee, she was fighting for her life as her family scoured the city for rare antibiotics.

(Ariana Cubillos/AP)