A&E in the War Zone on Channel 4

10 December 2014

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Hospitals in the war torn city of Aleppo are being forced underground because of a deliberate bombing campaign by Syrian government forces, says one of Britain’s leading trauma surgeons, who has recently returned from the region.    

Tonight (Wed 10 December), Channel 4 will broadcast A&E in the War Zone, a film about Dr David Nott’s perilous journey across the border into Syria to work alongside the last remaining Syrian doctors in Aleppo.  We see him carrying out life-saving surgery in a hospital forced underground by daily bombardment. Amid the horror, these medical teams risk their lives to save others.

The civil war in Syria is now in its fourth year and has created one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the world right now.

Millions have been displaced, with the UN estimating that almost 200,000 people have been killed since the civil war began with many hundreds of thousands more injured.

In 2013, London based trauma surgeon Dr David Nott travelled to Aleppo to train local doctors.   In September of this year he returned to the city, which he describes as unrecognisable from the place he visited only a year earlier. 

Syria’s largest city once had 2,000 doctors.  Now fewer than 40 doctors remain. 

Dr David Nott says:  “Hospitals should be safe havens, but [in the non-government controlled areas] in Aleppo the last remaining hospitals are being forced underground because of the deliberate bombing of them by the Assad regime.”   

“I saw this with my own eyes.  A hospital that I worked in for 3 weeks in 2013 was later reduced to rubble by a barrel bomb. This was not an isolated incident.”  

His concerns are mirrored by human rights groups who say that doctors and hospitals in areas opposed to the government have been deliberately targeted by the regime.

Human rights groups say two-thirds of Syria’s public hospitals have been bombed.

Almost 600 medical staff have been killed in this war and thousands more have fled the country.

During Dr David Nott’s time in the hospitals there’s a constant stream of casualties, many of whom were children. 

“The majority of casualties I treated during my recent visit to Aleppo were children”, he says.  “Too often, they were suffering devastating injuries caused by the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by the Syrian Government.” 

Nobody knows exactly how many thousands of children have been injured but over 12,000 have been killed in this civil war.

Notes to Editor
A&E in the War Zone, Wednesday 10th December at 11pm on Channel 4

Dr David Nott volunteered to travel to Syria with the Manchester based charity Syria Relief

Press Contact
Peter Heneghan, Channel 4 Press Office