In the anti-Covid unit at the Kafr Takharim field hospital in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, healthcare workers are on the verge of exhaustion. “Sometimes, I am desperate in the face of the lack of means to deal with the epidemic”, confides on the phone, his voice extinguished, Doctor Ahmad Saado, Wednesday, September 22. For two months, the 29-year-old Syrian, eight other doctors and twenty nurses have taken turns day and night to welcome and take care of a continuous flow of Covid-19 patients. After having been relatively spared by the previous epidemic waves, the rebel pocket of Idlib has been experiencing an outbreak of contamination cases since the summer, fueled by the strong contagiousness of the Delta variant.
The health system was already hanging by a thread in the overcrowded enclave, the scene of deadly fighting between forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad, backed by Russia, and the armed insurgency, backed by Turkey. Half of the hospitals and health centers were damaged, systematically targeted by the Syrian regime and the Russian air force. A large part of the nursing staff joined the flow of refugees. Despite the truce decreed in March 2020 between Ankara and Moscow, the 4 million inhabitants of the enclave (including 2.5 million displaced persons) live under the drip of international aid, which is arriving in a trickle. the Turkish border. Local authorities, under the control of the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham (HTS), are struggling to respond to the economic crisis in Idlib, as in the rest of the country.
The anti-Covid structures put in place since spring 2020 by Syrian caregivers, with the remote support of foreign NGOs and the World Health Organization (WHO), are no longer sufficient. On September 21, the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo recorded 1,312 cases of Covid-19 and 8 deaths. Experts consider the official figures to be underestimated. With some 2,470 tests performed that day, the positivity rate was over 50%. The measures taken by the “national salvation government” led by HTS – postponement of the start of the school year, closure of markets – are insufficient in the eyes of caregivers. The Idlib doctors’ union alerted this week to the ongoing health disaster: in the absence of international emergency aid, it estimated that the health system will collapse.
“Hospitals lack everything”
In Kafr Takharim, the 10 beds equipped with ventilators in the intensive care unit and the 25 beds in the isolation center, installed with the support of the Medical Association of Syrian Expatriates (SEMA) based in France, are already all occupied. , permanently. “More than a hundred patients present themselves every day. We send patients elsewhere while waiting for a bed to become available. We once received a patient from Ariha, a town 55 kilometers from here. Due to the lack of hospitals in the province, patients are taken care of when they are already in very critical condition. And we lack medicines and oxygen to take care of them ”, deplores Doctor Saado, who counts between one to three deaths per day in his structure.
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