"We are losing our future": The human cost of Syria's civil war
ANTAKYA, Turkey -- Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday the U.S. investigating whether chlorine gas was unleashed on civilians this week in the Syrian civil war, leaving six people dead.
The U.S. also accuses the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar Assad of dropping barrels of explosives from aircraft onto rebel-held neighborhoods, designed to maim indiscriminately.
Dr. Abdul is one of the few surgeons still working in Aleppo. He asked that we not show his face.
"There's a lot of patient coming from multiple injury due to these barrel bombs," he said.
On a bad day, Abdul told us, as many as 30 barrel bombs are dropped on the city.
"The ambulance just bringing patients and just dropped them at the door of the hospital," Abdul said. "Someone is dead here, and another one is dead here. Someone is coming and ask you, 'Where is my little girl, where is my little baby, where is my little boy?'"
He faces the impossible choice of deciding who to operate on first.
"The rule is, do the best for the most," he said. "I let some of these patients untreated and died because I don't have the ability to treat them, I don't have staff."
Hospitals are often targets of the Assad regime in Syria, so Dr. Abdul and his staff moved theirs underground.
"The windows has been covered by sandbags," Abdul described. "Everybody in the hospital and mainly the doctors have their own head lamps, which is used for, sometimes for doing surgery in the darkness."
Many of the victims are children.
As he looked at a photo of a man holding his son, Abdul recalled, "He lost his son, he's crying... I've no words to say to him."
Dr. Abdul told us he suffers from nightmares. Throughout the interview, his leg twitched incessantly.
"Every attack, more than half of our victims or injured people are children," he said. "It's very sad, it's very sad. I think that those children are our future. We are losing our future."
