PARIS – Many civilians who have been wounded in their country's violence are unable to get adequate medical treatment -- in part because security forces have taken over many public hospitals, an international aid group said Wednesday.
Doctors Without Borders released a video in Paris showing interviews with 10 wounded Syrians and five Syrian doctors who have fled the nation.
The unidentified witnesses said many wounded are afraid to go to such hospitals for treatment, knowing that Syrian authorities could arrest them and subject them to interrogation or even torture. Instead, some get whatever treatment they can in private clinics or makeshift hospitals in homes.
Doctors Without Borders, which is not authorized to work in Syria, said it could not independently confirm the Syrians' accounts.
Doctors Without Borders said it was making the testimony public because of the "recurrence and the gravity" of the accounts in several regions of Syria.
Most accounts describe public hospitals as a No. 1 place to avoid, because security forces surround them and sometimes are inside. The names of those admitted are handed to them, according to the witnesses.
References to torture are prevalent in the testimony.
"We've seen different types of injuries, notably contusions from being hit, fatal electric shocks," one doctor said. "One person was electrocuted in the mouth until he died. I saw that."
One 34-year-old man injured in December recounts losing three fingers and much of his palm in a torture session during 15 days of detention.
"The last day, they put a photograph of (Syrian President) Bashar Assad in front of me and asked me to kneel before the photo, praying to God," the man recounted in the testimony. He refused, pulling away the photo, a gesture that "made them crazy," he said.
After repeated mistreatment, "they attached a detonator to my hand linked to a long wire (and) a battery, then they turned on the current and it exploded," the account says.
A 29-year-old man, with a bullet wound in his calf, said he awoke to find himself in a hospital and security forces were inside. "They even attacked intensive care and I was taken out of the hospital so as not to get hurt."
Another man said that even ambulances were unsafe, manned by security forces in his region when he was injured in March by a sniper.
Doctors' accounts corroborated the dangers of some hospitals.
In the public hospitals, "most of the nurses are for the regime. For example, they say in front of a patient that they'll amputate because he is for the revolution," a surgeon said in one account.
"Sometimes they insult the patients, hit them and say, 'You want freedom? Is that the freedom you want?"'
