Suffering and loss among Syrians in hospitals in Tripoli, Lebanon

By Neil Sammonds, Amnesty International’s Syria researcher

"Two weeks ago ‘Amina’ lost her legs, her husband and her two small children.

In a Tripoli hospital she tells me with remarkable composure how her life was, quite literally, blown apart.

“When the regime forces attacked our village – an hour from Homs city – we fled and stayed outside, slept in an empty building,” she said.

“Two days later it was quiet and so we were returning on motorbike. I was on the back, holding my 13-month-old daughter in my left arm; my husband was in front of me and our three-year-old son in his lap. Missiles hit us, I don’t know which kind.”

While the accounts given to Amnesty International during a research trip to Lebanon in May blame government forces for the attacks which destroyed Amina’s family as well as a number of others, restrictions placed by the Syrian authorities on visits by NGOs like Amnesty International to Syria mean that it is extremely difficult to investigate the circumstances in which such horrific injuries and deaths were caused.

A physician with international experience in injuries from armed conflicts, ‘Dr Nabil’, explains later that the most common emergency injuries among Syrians here are from mortars, which he says are fired at groups assembled in public – whether students, people in marketplaces and shops and so on – and explode in their entirety into shrapnel.

No matter the exact circumstances of such attacks, mortars are notoriously imprecise weapons and should not be used in densely populated areas....."