Portraits of The Atrocities: Injured and Ill Without Treatment
In similar situations of which the Syrian people are going through, one can understand the process of dealing with our ordeal as per a priority list. For instance, rescuing a person shot by a sniper comes before providing a prosthetic peripheral for another who lost a leg due to a splinter. Likewise, performing a c-section surgery is more urgent than treating a patient from a chronic disease. However, giving a priority for emergency and severe cases does not mean ignoring the other victims; the injured or sick; and leaving them to their suffering and slow death.
Many victims of Assad’s regime; those who were mutilated or injured in this war and whose treatment expenses are so expensive that they usually do not get any help despite the fact that this cannot be delayed. Everything else could wait except for the body when it declares insurgency and fails its incubator. It is inexplicable how can one ignores a person who needs a wheel-chair or a prosthetic leg under a “priority” pretext.
For example, inside the Zaatary camp in Jordan there is no medical association or organization except for the “Awn (Aid) Association” and another one specialized with the Deaf and Mute people which has recently started its activity leaving hundreds others for the individual effort of the volunteering activists over there.
One of the first activists in the camp, Abo Faisal, describes the situation and indicating that “any activity for an association or organization is being coordinated with the field activists in an arbitrary and unorganized pattern thus, the majority of the load is on those activists and hundreds are being aided in this fashion.” The tragedy lies in the fact that the most critical and most expensive cases are being left unattended most of the times. Medical care is only available for minor emergencies and also for gun shots and injuries by the regime’s missiles who were transferred to the camp after being injured. Even those do not get continued medical assistance after being ministered especially if they had developed a permanent deformity.
Hundreds other ill refugees remain without treatment due to blocked roads between them and their doctors or lack of doctors in their areas particularly, the cases that need a great deal of care and expenses. Moreover, there are 20 cancer patients inside the Zaatary camp who do not get any level of care besides dozens other heart and kidney patients who need immediate surgeries that are not being directly sponsored by any association.
Abo Faisal continued conveying the atrocities and said that patients with chronic disease also suffer from extensive neglect such as those infected with “Filariasis”, “Crohn's”, “Epidermolysis Bullosa”, “Ankylosing Spondylitis and Spondyloarthritis” and many other rare diseases who do not get the minimal level of nursing to relieve their pain.
At any rate and aside from the critical and expensive cases, the situation is not any better because it is uncommon for a detainee to be freed without any sort of internal or dermal disease that requires treatment for months. Most of the time, the released detainee is left with the only choice of ignoring them due to lack of funds and inaccessibility to public hospitals.
Small initiatives are no longer satisfactory or sufficient and it is disgraceful to leave those patients to their slow death or suffering with their disease when we can avoid it if being genuinely supported and organized.
“Hundreds other ill refugees remain without treatment due to blocked roads between them and their doctors or lack of doctors in their areas.”
