Aleppo Diary: The Carnage From Syrian Barrel Bombs
Dr. Samer Attar’s heartbreaking dispatch from war-torn Syria.
As an editor and writer with The Wall Street Journal for two decades (1997-2017), I worked on thousands of first-person pieces, some written by dissidents from their jail cells; others by survivors of war and senseless acts of terror. But the one that still haunts me the most—indeed, is seared into my memory—was written by a Chicago surgeon in 2015 upon his return from war-torn Syria. His name is Dr. Samer Attar, and after the fall of Syria’s murderous Assad regime in December, I reached out to him, asking if he might write a follow-up piece for TFP in the wake of Bashar Assad’s defeat and exile in Russia. “Your memories and hopes for those you helped there are what I’m most interested in,” I wrote. He responded 10 days later, with this brief note:
thank you so much for reaching out
i’m sorry i didn’t respond to this right away
i was in gaza on a medical mission and just returned home yesterday.
I soon learned that Dr. Attar, in addition to his many medical missions to Syria, has carried out similar missions around the globe. As he wrote in The New York Times in September 2023, “My Syrian heritage inspired me to make my first trip to a war zone, to Aleppo in 2013. I returned repeatedly and went to Liberia during the Ebola epidemic in 2015, Iraq during the violence wrought by the Islamic State in 2017, Ukraine for the first time just weeks after Russia’s invasion and Idlib, Syria, during the Turkish-Syrian earthquake this year, among other places.” In November 2017, he was featured on CBS’s “60 Minutes” for his work in Syria’s makeshift hospitals.
In 2023, after his third mission to Ukraine, he said, “Not since volunteering in Aleppo, Syria, in 2016 during the civil war there had I witnessed so many traumatic amputations and blast injuries. The wounds that I encountered in Ukraine looked the same as in Syria: disfigured faces pocked with shrapnel; disemboweled bellies; dismembered bodies; limbs with massive defects of skin with jumbled bone shards, shredded muscle and noodled tendons; gaping chest wounds with collapsed lungs; severe head wounds.” That’s not surprising, since Russia helped the Assad regime kill hundreds of thousands of its own people.
How many precisely? It’s hard to say. Overall death tolls run as high as 620,000. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, no fewer than 231,278 civilians were killed between March 2011 and March 2024, including 15,334 who died due to torture, with 30,193 children and 16,451 women included in the death toll. Roughly 14 million citizens have been displaced.
When I told Dr. Attar that the 10th anniversary of his 2015 WSJ op-ed was fast approaching, he said he was far too busy to write a new piece looking back on Syria, but he gave me permission to republish the original piece in TFP. As he explains below, many innocents in Syria were killed or maimed by crude “barrel bombs—metal cylinders and drums packed with explosives and shrapnel that are pushed out of Syrian government helicopters. They cannot be aimed. They are indiscriminately dropped onto civilians, houses, schools and hospitals.” Now, with Assad and many of his military advisers in Russia, concerns are mounting that barrel bombs will be deployed by Putin against Ukrainians, if they haven’t been already.
One final note of thanks to Dr. Attar for his courage and compassion, and for an article—and lede—that leaves readers, this one included, breathless. —MJ
Aleppo Diary: The Carnage From Syrian Barrel Bombs
FROM THE ARCHIVES
The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2015
By Samer Attar
‘Were you able to sew it back on?” That was the question a 9-year-old Syrian boy asked me when he woke from surgery. His hand was obliterated after a helicopter dropped a barrel bomb on his school. All I could do was clean his wound, wrap it with gauze, and tell him he was going to be all right. Deep inside I knew I couldn’t even promise him that. I still saw helicopters passing outside. Life in a Syrian hospital means anticipating death at every moment.
Barrel bombs are metal cylinders and drums packed with explosives and shrapnel that are pushed out of Syrian government helicopters. They cannot be aimed. They are indiscriminately dropped onto civilians, houses, schools and hospitals. Upon impact, they pancake buildings and pulverize limbs and bodies. They have killed and maimed thousands, causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.
I am a surgeon from Chicago who has worked in field hospitals in Aleppo, Syria. There I witnessed such brutality daily. I treated families crushed by barrel bombs while trying to take shelter in their homes. I treated children permanently paralyzed or blinded by shrapnel. I did more amputations than I had time to count. I will never forget the night one expectant mother presented to our ER after shrapnel from an airstrike penetrated her abdomen. Neither mother nor unborn child made it.
My colleague Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of the Syrian-American Medical Society, recently returned from a medical mission to Aleppo. Conditions, he says, are worse than ever. Hundreds of people dying in one weekend is the new normal. Mangled limbs, exposed organs, crushed skulls, dismembered children, bombed-out hospitals protected only by sandbags, underground emergency rooms where efforts to resuscitate dying patients take place on floors smeared with blood—all these scenarios are now routine for Syrian doctors and nurses.
More than 200,000 people have so far been killed. More than 12 million are in need of humanitarian assistance; nearly half are children. Civilians continue to endure campaigns of starvation, torture, indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment. On March 17, this newspaper reported a barrel bomb containing poisonous chlorine gas had been dropped on a residential neighborhood in Sarmeen, an opposition-controlled town near the Turkish border, killing a family of six and injuring scores more.
Despite three United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that all warring parties cease attacks on civilians, including the Syrian government’s use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons, the slaughter of innocents continues. Outside Damascus in Eastern Ghouta, where a government chemical-weapons attack killed 1,300 people in August 2013, thousands now face starvation due to the ongoing siege. According to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, this year alone the Syrian government has denied access for 30 of 33 U.N. aid convoy requests. Yet world powers still look away.
For 2015 the U.N. has requested $8.4 billion for the humanitarian needs of Syria and Syrian refugees—more than half the $16.4 billion requested world-wide. Yet no amount of humanitarian aid will offset the systematic and sustained slaughter of civilians.
Ask any doctor in Aleppo how to help them save lives and their first response is not more aid. They all say the same thing: “Stop the barrel bombs.” A year ago, I asked a doctor there what he would need if the bombings didn’t stop. “More body bags,” he said.
There is no immediate resolution to the war in Syria. But there are steps that can be taken to alleviate suffering and save lives—U.N.-enforced no-fly zones and humanitarian buffer zones, for example, where civilians can be safe, refugees can return home, and medical neutrality is respected. Refugee camps and field hospitals need more access, funding and resources. Above all, what is needed is greater international pressure on the Syrian government to cease its bombing of civilians and lift its blockades of humanitarian aid.
There are still good people inside Syria struggling to reach those most in need—medics of the Aleppo City Medical Council, volunteers of the Red Crescent, the unarmed White Helmet rescue workers, to name a few. They will be the ones who will rebuild the country and counteract extremism. Until any meaningful political solution is achieved, they—and the Syrian men, women and children they are trying to save—must not be forgotten.
Dr. Attar is a professor of orthopedic surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He volunteered in field hospitals with the Syrian-American Medical Society in Aleppo in August 2013 and April 2014.
