The least we can do for the brave doctors of Aleppo

If we won’t help them, let’s at least honor their courage and sacrifice in a proper way.

I am referring to 15 doctors in eastern Aleppo in Syria. Earlier this month, these doctors wrote to President Obama pleading for help. “We are 15 of the last doctors serving the remaining 300,000 citizens of Eastern Aleppo,” their letter began. Since 2012, Aleppo, the second largest governorate in Syria, has been divided between Syrian regime-held areas in the west and the opposition areas in the east. Earlier this month, the opposition forces appeared to partly break a siege of eastern Aleppo that had left the population there desperately short of food and medicine.

{mosads}For months, Syria and Russian planes have targeted medical facilities in eastern Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria. As well, opposition rockets hit a hospital in the government-held area of Aleppo in April. According to the doctors’ letter, there were 42 attacks on medical facilities in Syria in July, “15 of which were hospitals in which we work. Right now, there is an attack on a medical facility every 17 hours.” When the siege was broken, Syrian and Russian aircraft stepped up the airstrikes on the eastern part of Aleppo.

When badly injured young children are brought into the emergency rooms in eastern Aleppo hospitals, the doctors have no choice but to triage because they don’t have enough medical equipment to help all of the children. “We have to prioritize those with better chances,” explained the doctors in their letter. One bomb explosion cut the oxygen supply to incubators in a hospital. Four newborn babies died a slow death from asphyxiation.

The doctors could be killed at any moment, but they are staying in Aleppo. “Despite the horror, we choose to be here. We took a pledge to help those in need.” The letter pleaded for American assistance to open a “permanent lifeline to Aleppo.” Inaction, the doctors wrote, means that America will share the responsibility for the crimes of the Syrian government and its Russian ally.

A White House official anonymously responded to the letter by telling CNN that, “The US has repeatedly condemned indiscriminate bombing of medical facilities by the [Bashar] Assad regime in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria.” The official expressed admiration for the doctors, but did not suggest that the U.S. government was about to take military action, the only practical way to open a humanitarian corridor to eastern Aleppo.

Is that the best we can do? An anonymous White House functionary? No doubt the White House calculation was that, if President Obama acknowledged the letter, personally praised the doctors and condemned the Syrian and Russian airstrikes, he would look ineffectual.

Call me cynical, but Obama has been ineffectual in alleviating the humanitarian disaster that goes by the name of Syria — and everyone knows it. The least he can do is pay tribute to these doctors.

But let’s also be honest with ourselves. American inaction isn’t simply because Obamas instincts are to avoid a military conflict with Syrian and Russian forces. The American people don’t want such a fight either, even if hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake in Syria. American forces have “been there, done that” in the Middle East and the American public just doesn’t want any more of it. 

And, for that matter, the world appears to prefer to avert its eyes, even if images like that of Omran Daqneesh, the bloodied, soot-covered little Syrian boy in an ambulance, sometimes make that difficult. There are no worldwide demonstrations against Russia. Strong protests in the Muslim world, especially, might have an impact on Russian policy.

Even if we can’t stop the bombing of Aleppo, the necessity still exists to do something. So read the Aleppo doctors’ letter and reflect on their heroism and dedication or send a link to the letter to your friends or discuss the doctors over the dinner table. At the least, theirs is courage to tell your children about. As the great 19th-century English anti-slavery campaigner Wilbur Wilberforce once said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

Wallance, a writer and lawyer in New York City, and a former federal prosecutor, is the author most recently of “America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy.” Follow him on Twitter @gregorywallance.

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