No more cards from Syria

Aleppo, 24^th August 1992, the cafe at the top of the citadel. Drinking a beer, writing the journal of a cycling tour of the country and minding my own business when a man sits at my table uninvited. Not in itself unusual, mostly my uninvited guests were Mukhabarat, the secret police pretending to be students practising their English — but not this one. His name was M Manar and he became one of a group of Syrians that every year, around mid-December, sent me a Christmas card.

He wrote his name along with others in a spidery hand in the back leaf of my diary, saying he would stay in touch. He and five others did. A garish card from Lattakia, Tartous, Homs, Hama and two annually from Damascus. Inside, a summary of the year as experienced by the sender. I had sent them one from me with my own summary — and this went on uninterrupted until the war started. One was killed in the first year. Two fled in the second. One is in Germany and the other in Italy. Two ‘disappeared’ in the third and then there was Manar. His card from last Christmas is in the bundle in a large envelope where I have kept every one that came to me.

Last Saturday morning, I got a message from an aid agency working in Syria that he was dead, killed in one of the hospital bombings of that week. My contact details were in a notebook found on his body. He only ever wrote, we never emailed or phoned despite him having my email address and number. The news came to me via an SMS. He was a hospital orderly at the time of his death.

Why bother to highlight the death of a single individual in a war with hundreds of thousands dead? Because the nature of war has changed, the rules have been re-written in the past decade and the unspoken ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ torn up, discarded. War has become truly total and those that volunteer — or are paid — to give relief and succour amidst the bombs and bullets are now targets themselves. Deliberately killed to undermine the enemy of whoever killed them, weakening aid and medical infrastructure, striking at the heart of civilian morale. Culling men women and children indiscriminately.

This savagery has become the new normal. It is expected that aid convoys and hospitals will be hit. It is a couple of days beyond a year since the Medicine Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was hit in a sustained strike by an AC 130 gunship. The location was known via a system of notification to both the Afghan government forces and the Americans. At least 42 died, 30 were injured and the hospital devastated. A Syrian Red Crescent convoy into Aleppo was hit by an air strike, either Russian or Syrian government, on September 20. The Aleppo hospitals, including one burrowed into a hillside, have been hit repeatedly. So died Manar.

The scale may be smaller but the savagery is no less in Pakistan. The blast at a Quetta hospital on August 9 left at least 70 dead. Lawyers were the Taliban target, but the hospital the site of the strike that killed so many — including first responders and hospital staff. On an even smaller scale women who work as polio vaccinators are murdered regularly as are doctors that administer the programme. Staffers of NGO’s are targeted from time to time, their deaths or injuries largely unremarked, the agencies they work for often vilified, the work they do rubbished.

We — and I still volunteer in the aid and development sectors periodically — are the unarmed soldiers on the frontlines these days. Most of us make informed decisions about going into harm’s way. Polio vaccinators are more likely driven to the job by poverty rather than the humanitarian imperative. My friend Manar was just doing a job that he had done for years. He went to work every day pushing trolleys, helping the doctors and nurses on the wards and all for a small — but regular — wage to feed and house his extended family. He was the last, there will be no more cards from Syria, and I so much the poorer.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2016.

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