Like everyone, I have spent recent months watching countless news reports of desperate Syrians trying to escape their country, and now shivering in the freezing cold on Europe’s borders. But unlike most people, I’ve seen what they are running from.
As one of the few Western doctors who has spent time in Syria in the past few years, I experienced the eye of the storm in war-ravaged Aleppo.
So as a major peace conference gets under way in Vienna today, I know what is at stake.
Every day we would hear helicopters dropping barrels filled with TNT on the civilian population.
The emergency department would then suddenly be full of dead and dying children with horrific injuries that even I, as a supposedly hardened war surgeon, had difficulty coping with emotionally.
The images still haunt me.
To see children with arms and legs blown off, suffering and dying in agony because we had no morphine to give them, was soul- destroying.
We admitted patients covered in dust from the concrete of their blown-apart homes. Even those that we felt had a chance with surgery more often than not died because their lungs were so congested.
One thought kept going through my mind: why didn’t the West act decisively to relieve the human suffering and end this war?
The West let the best strategy be the enemy of the good in Syria – and now we have seen the enormous price of not intervening, as it fell to Tony Blair to argue this week, in his partial mea culpa for the invasion of Iraq.
The UK’s efforts in Syria have only tinkered at the edges of a humanitarian catastrophe.
When Assad crossed Barack Obama’s stated red line in his use of chemical weapons in August 2013, the US president stood back and did nothing.
All the time, Syria’s people faced slaughter – and now Vladimir Putin has stepped into the vacuum to shore up the faltering regime of the murderous Bashar al-Assad.
I saw the humanitarian and security situation decline throughout three six-week visits to Syria in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Later, I told of what I saw in interviews: the children blown apart by barrel bombs; the snipers targeting pregnant women.
In a BBC interview I called for boots on the ground and for the UN to develop humanitarian corridors to relieve the civilian suffering ... but no one wanted to listen.
In 2014, as in 2013, I worked in Aleppo in two hospitals in an opposition neighbourhood. Many of the medics had fled to Turkey and many hospitals had been bombed.
I came back to the UK and once again spoke about what was happening in Syria.
I called it what it was – a genocide perpetrated by Assad – but still I was met with government apathy.
There were efforts made by the US and UK to train some rebel groups and provide assistance to refugees; there was talk of humanitarian corridors and no-fly zones – but ultimately, without a protective military presence, such initiatives would never succeed.
It was vacillation on the part of the US and UK that emboldened not only the Assad regime but Putin too.
The only way to win this war is to put boots on the ground, which should have been done years ago ... In a glimmer of hope, though, all the major powers involved are now to meet at a peace conference in Austria.
End horrific suffering of Syrian children
As one of the few Western doctors who has spent time in Syria in the past few years, I experienced the eye of the storm in war-ravaged Aleppo.
So as a major peace conference gets under way in Vienna today, I know what is at stake.
Every day we would hear helicopters dropping barrels filled with TNT on the civilian population.
The emergency department would then suddenly be full of dead and dying children with horrific injuries that even I, as a supposedly hardened war surgeon, had difficulty coping with emotionally.
The images still haunt me.
To see children with arms and legs blown off, suffering and dying in agony because we had no morphine to give them, was soul- destroying.
We admitted patients covered in dust from the concrete of their blown-apart homes. Even those that we felt had a chance with surgery more often than not died because their lungs were so congested.
One thought kept going through my mind: why didn’t the West act decisively to relieve the human suffering and end this war?
The West let the best strategy be the enemy of the good in Syria – and now we have seen the enormous price of not intervening, as it fell to Tony Blair to argue this week, in his partial mea culpa for the invasion of Iraq.
The UK’s efforts in Syria have only tinkered at the edges of a humanitarian catastrophe.
When Assad crossed Barack Obama’s stated red line in his use of chemical weapons in August 2013, the US president stood back and did nothing.
All the time, Syria’s people faced slaughter – and now Vladimir Putin has stepped into the vacuum to shore up the faltering regime of the murderous Bashar al-Assad.
I saw the humanitarian and security situation decline throughout three six-week visits to Syria in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Later, I told of what I saw in interviews: the children blown apart by barrel bombs; the snipers targeting pregnant women.
In a BBC interview I called for boots on the ground and for the UN to develop humanitarian corridors to relieve the civilian suffering ... but no one wanted to listen.
In 2014, as in 2013, I worked in Aleppo in two hospitals in an opposition neighbourhood. Many of the medics had fled to Turkey and many hospitals had been bombed.
I came back to the UK and once again spoke about what was happening in Syria.
I called it what it was – a genocide perpetrated by Assad – but still I was met with government apathy.
There were efforts made by the US and UK to train some rebel groups and provide assistance to refugees; there was talk of humanitarian corridors and no-fly zones – but ultimately, without a protective military presence, such initiatives would never succeed.
It was vacillation on the part of the US and UK that emboldened not only the Assad regime but Putin too.
The only way to win this war is to put boots on the ground, which should have been done years ago ... In a glimmer of hope, though, all the major powers involved are now to meet at a peace conference in Austria.
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