Aleppo Diary: The Carnage From Syrian Barrel Bombs

Dr. Samer Attar’s heartbreaking dispatch from war-torn Syria.

Dr. Samer Attar, associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, discusses his work in war-torn Syria with 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley in 2017 (CBS News).

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 reachi…