Dr. Anas Al Kassem is heading into northwestern Syria to help doctors on the ground there deal with the overwhelming number of people injured by last week's powerful earthquake.
Dr. Anas Al Kassem, who lives in Canada, has gone to Syria many times during the civil war to treat the injured. Now, he's heading back in to help earthquake survivors.
"They have a significant lack of antibiotics and painkillers and anesthesia drugs," Al Kassem says, translating for Qaddour. On Monday, one week after the earthquake struck, the United Nations announced that Assad had agreed to open two new crossing points from Turkey to the northwest to allow for improved delivery of the desperately needed aid, including equipment, for an initial period of three months.
"We urgently need the UN to open more border crossings into northwest Syria so that cross-border humanitarian aid can flow in unhindered. Failing to escalate medical aid deliveries rapidly will leave the UN with more blood on its hands."Muhaid Kaddour, another surgeon working in an Idlib field hospital, confirmed that as of Friday, he hadn't received any help.
"The hospitals were built or constructed within the last 10 years of the war. So they're fragile hospitals. They're not very well equipped," Al Kassem explained. "Turkey is more developed than Syria, if you will." "I think it's way more overwhelming because of the scale of the disaster and because of the short time [in which] it happened," he said. "Imagine the area of Idlib and northern Syria has four million people. Almost three million are internally displaced."
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