Dar al-Shifah clinic: the news report you cannot afford to miss

Nowhere describes Syria’s disintegration as a nation more acutely than her shattered second city of Aleppo. Nowhere describes the agony of Syria more acutely than that city’s Dar al-Shifah clinic.

Despite the almost complete lack of medical staff, drugs, equipment and even sanitation, the clinic tends the cascades of brutally injured civilians and fighters alike pouring through its door. So short of nursing staff are they that 12-year-old Mohammad and 11-year-old Jussuf are amongst scores of youngsters who have been harnessed to tend to the injured.

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They swab, they staunch, they pump, they wipe some of the very worst injuries that man’s inhumanity to man can inflict

The nearby river Quoeiq finds rebel forces one side and government forces ranged upstream. From time to time each day, the unseen upstream presence dispatches a body. The day that we filmed four came down in the space of five minutes. Their hands tied behind their backs, there was a child of no more than 10; an old man stripped naked, and two others.

On the streets in this city in which Christians and Muslims lived in harmonious unity, the Islamists now hold sway and they are radicalising by the day. They are winning hearts and minds too with their tender collecting of bodies; their food drops; their tending of the wounded, and their cleaning of the streets. They run informal schools too in the absence of any others – schools which have the Koran as their guiding light.

As time ticks by, Syria is splitting into a thousand smithereens. Though moderates still just prevail on the rebel side, the Islamist hardliners are in the fast ascendant.

This is what our latest report – filmed in Aleppo over the past few weeks – reveals. Don’t miss it. It is the most affecting piece of television news I have seen in a very long time.

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