A doctor at a makeshift hospital displays a bullet removed from the hand of a young girl wounded during what protesters said was an attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, at the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. (Reuters)
French surgeon Jacque Beres who recently returned to Paris from Syria describes the bloodbath he saw there as among the most horrific he has ever witnessed in his 40 years of work in war zones.
Beres spent 12 days in the besieged city of Homs in February after smuggling himself in, setting up a makeshift hospital in a private residence in the battered neighborhood of Baba Amro.
He operated on 89 people, many of whom he says were the elderly, women and children. He was able to save most, but nine died on the operating table and another two within a day.
“The light was horrible, just a bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the water was scarce,” the 72-year-old French surgeon and co-founder of Doctors without Borders told the Toronto Star. “There was so much dust in the air, and it would go into the open wounds of patients.”
Beres went to Syria at the behest of France-Syrie Democracy and the Union of Muslim Associations in France. He crossed the border illegally from Lebanon and managed - seemingly as the only Western doctor- to reach Homs.
“This is hell” said Beres on Tuesday at a meeting of human rights activists in Geneva.
“It’s mass murder. It’s totally unfair. It’s unjustifiable”
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