Dr. Hasan Al-A’raj was a good man who truly cared about the well-being of Syrian people.
He could have left Syria altogether like thousands of other health care professionals have done in the past five years.
And who would have blamed him?
Certainly not his wife or his five young children.
It’s not that he couldn’t have chosen to work elsewhere either. He was a cardiologist and a member of the Syrian American Medical Society aka SAMS.
But instead of playing it safe, he chose to remain in Syria as the Health Director and SAMS Coordinator of Hama.
He was also not naïve about the danger he faced.
Earlier this year Dr. Hasan was asked by SAMS what he wanted most from the international community. He said; “The way that people are looking at the conflict is from a political perspective, not from the humanitarian side. The thing I would ask for right now is that the world acts in order to protect patients, like with underground hospitals. We need protection.”
But even working in an underground hospital like Kafr Zita, which had been built into the side of a mountain, was not enough to protect a superhero like Dr. Hasan from the criminal Assad regime and its allies.
He died Wednesday morning when a missile fired from a warplane hit his vehicle as he was leaving Kafr Zita cave hospital.
There is no doubt that this was a deliberate action by the Assad regime and its allies, for our hero doctor has now joined more than 750 doctors who were targeted and killed by the regime since the beginning of the Syrian Revolution in 2011.
Not only has the United Nations failed miserably in protecting medical facilities and personnel in Syria, they have consistently catered to the Assad regime in their efforts to be “impartial”.
The latest example of their “impartiality” was seen just nine days before the murder of Dr. Hasan when the World Health Organization (WHO) --- a specialized agency of the United Nations that is supposedly concerned with international public health --- delivered the first batch of ten brand new ambulances to the Assad regime at the port of Lattakia.
The presentation was made by Elizabeth Hoff, WHO’s resident representative in Syria, to the regime’s health minister, Nizar Yazigi.
According to SANA, Hoff and Yazigi are working together in “continuous efforts to meet the Syrian citizens’ health needs and provide health facilities and centers with necessary medical equipment, medicine and ambulances.”
Could it be possible that WHO is delivering new ambulances to the regime because they know very well that if they delivered them to the Syrians in the liberated areas who truly need them, they would only end up being destroyed by the regime the same way countless others have been in the past five years?
It is no secret that the regime has deliberately targeted every hospital, clinic, doctor, health care worker, paramedic and ambulance they could find.
The situation has been so bad that a number of humanitarian organizations who donated desperately needed ambulances requested they be built without any identifying characteristics, especially ones that would identify them as ambulances from the air.
In addition, the regime consistently removes pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies from humanitarian aid deliveries to besieged areas which makes it pretty obvious that when Elizabeth Hoff says she is committed to efforts to “meet the Syrian citizens’ health needs and provide health facilities and centers with necessary medical equipment, medicine and ambulances” she doesn’t mean all of Syria’s citizens --- and she surely did not mean Dr. Hasan Al-A’Raj, the only remaining cardiologist in the Hama Governorate.
WHO’s Constitution states that its objective "is the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health".
For five years those who have been committed to simply saving lives and treating the effects of the systematic targeting and destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure in Syria have been doing the best that they can to keep medical services available to those Syrians that Assad has chosen to render invisible to the rest of the world --- as he supplies the media with stories of fighting “terrorists” like Dr. Hasan Al-A’Raj.
We have come to expect nothing better from the man who would do anything to hold onto his daddy’s chair.
But for the United Nations’ World Health Organization to render those who suffer terribly as a result of his self-serving agenda invisible as well is unforgivable.
Humanitarians all over the world have donated money to supply medical equipment and ambulances to those who desperately need them in Syria --- and the regime continues to destroy them as fast as they can.
And WHO’s response to the humanitarian crisis that has been created by the Assad regime is to reward them with a fleet of shiny new ambulances.
http://orient-news.net/en/news_show/109140/0/WHO-protecting-who-in-Syria