On Bombing Hospitals

By Stefan Tarnowski.

In the summer of 2019, I took part in an investigation by the Syrian Archive into attacks on medical facilities in Syria, described by the Lancet in 2017 as ‘the most dangerous place on earth for healthcare providers’. The Syrian Archive verified 410 incidents of hospital bombings, and identified with confidence the perpetrators of 252 attacks. Ninety per cent of those were acts of aerial bombardment by Assad’s forces and their allies, in particular the Russian air force. Systematically targeting hospitals was one of their most ruthless tactics, a means to depopulate opposition areas.

There’s no starker asymmetry of power than the aerial bombardment of civilian areas by state and imperial air forces. The Syrian Archive decided that the most effective route to a prosecution would be through an investigation into hospital bombings. (The Yemeni Archive, a companion project, documented 133 attacks on hospitals and medical facilities in Yemen between 2014 and 2019, 72 of them carried out by the Saudi-led coalition, armed and assisted by the US and UK.) Hospitals and medical personnel are ‘protected objects’ under international law. Since Syria was also the most dangerous place in the world for journalists – first because the state had banned and expelled foreign correspondents from the country; second because journalists had been kidnapped and executed by militant groups – the investigation relied heavily on footage produced, at considerable risk, by media activists and first responders.

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