Black Thursday in Aleppo
Black Thursday in Aleppo Mohamed Al Najar | Senior Producer, Al Jazeera Net
As we approached Al Shifaa Hospital in Aleppo, my wound was still bleeding. I was assisted to the emergency room where a nurse put me on a gurney. But a few seconds later, even though the bleeding had not stopped, I left in a hurry, telling myself ‘my case is not a priority’. Although, as I was later told, I had passed out for a few minutes, I had felt ashamed to be treated while so many victims were lying on the hospital floor.
It was Thursday, October 5, 2012 and that scene is still carved into my memory. It has been nine years since I was hit by shrapnel from a mortar shell in Aleppo and still I cannot put into words the horrors I witnessed in that hospital: victims of the Syrian regime’s shelling – most of them women and children – torn to pieces. “We will clean the wound and stop the bleeding. An x-ray is needed to ensure there are no bone fractures, then you can go in peace,” a nurse told me before I left the hospital.
For more than a decade, similar scenes have become a daily reality in Syria, and particularly in Aleppo. My fellow journalists and I carry indelible memories; from the faces of the dead to the cries of the wounded. I will never forget the image of dead civilians lying in corridors because hospital morgues were too full. As the bodies piled up, they were moved to the sidewalk; left for hours and sometimes days before being buried. Many were never identified – some of them because the severity of the wounds left them beyond recognition.
On that Thursday when I was wounded, we had started our coverage at dawn. We had moved with caution through Aleppo’s Bustan Al Pacha district. Old houses, water fountains and all types of greenery still survived the ferocious fighting and relentless shelling by Russian and regime warplanes. The only sounds we could hear through the day and night were the jetfighters zooming above our heads or barrel bomb explosions.
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