The Syrian regime is persecuting the doctors and health workers treating wounded demonstrators and denying medical care to its opponents, says aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
"In Syria today, wounded patients and doctors are pursued and risk torture and arrest at the hands of the security services," MSF president Marie-Pierre Allie said. "Medicine is being used as a weapon of persecution."
The agency said it was not able to work inside Syria, where Bashar al-Assad's forces are brutally suppressing a revolt, but had interviewed witnesses who escaped to seek treatment in neighbouring states.
"Most of the wounded do not go to public hospitals, for fear of being tortured or arrested. When a wounded person is admitted to a hospital, a false name is sometimes used to hide his or her identity," the group said.
"Doctors sometimes provide a false diagnosis to help patients elude security forces, which search for patients with wounds consistent with those sustained in protests and demonstrations."
Allie demanded that hospitals be protected as neutral ground where the wounded of both sides can seek treatment, and accused the authorities of attacking ad hoc medical facilities set up by the opposition.
"The security services attack and destroy the mobile hospitals," said a Syrian doctor, cited anonymously in the MSF statement. "They enter houses looking for drugs and medical supplies."
"We are constantly being pursued by the security forces," said another Syrian doctor. "Many doctors who treated wounded patients in their private hospitals have been arrested and tortured."
Syria has been in turmoil for almost a year, after pro-democracy protests erupted as part of the Arab Spring series of revolts in the region. Human rights groups estimate that at least 6,000 people have been killed.
News home