The Syrian nurse, Muhammad al-Aghwani, in his blue clothes stained with blood and with a bandage on his head, sat while watching a video clip on his mobile phone, in which he heard the voice of a person growing up and screaming, “Massacre in Afrin Hospital.”
Al-Agwani is a witness to the massacre of Al-Shifa Hospital in the city of Afrin, which Turkey accuses of bombing the Syrian Democratic Forces last Saturday, which resulted in deaths and injuries.
Al-Aghwani says that since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, he has worked in the field of nursing and radiology, as well as in several hospitals in Eastern Ghouta, most of which were bombed.
He added – as he wandered around the destroyed Shifa Hospital, which was bombed a few days ago, and its equipment is scattered everywhere – that he started work in this hospital after the displacement in 2018, noting that the raids often targeted the hospital’s surroundings.
Last Saturday, Al-Shifa Hospital in the city of Afrin (northern Syria) was bombed, killing more than 13 people and wounding 27.
Civil Defense sources said that the first attack hit a residential area, while the second hit a hospital, shortly afterwards, and video clips posted on social media showed the dead in the rubble of the hospital.
Al-Agwany said – flickering the dust scattered on a computer – that the wounded and injured who fell in the bombing were treated and during that time, the hospital itself was bombed in the presence of the families of the wounded in one of the corridors, which led to the death of a number of them.
He sadly recalled the moments of his head injury and said that a block of the building fell on them while they were inside one of the rooms in the hospital after it was bombed, and that he tried to get out, but he could not because of the shrapnel scattered everywhere.
Al-Agwani continues to tell his story with a scene that he said he did not know was of such a catastrophic size, as he found that the corridor through which he came out of the demolished hospital was filled with the bodies of the dead, and said that the scene was shocking.
In his painful story, Al-Agwani says that the scattered body parts of the dead were difficult to identify, due to the severity of the injury, noting that the Al-Shifa Hospital incident brought him back to a similar incident that occurred in 2012, and it was just as horrific.
In his great sadness and amid the great destruction in the hospital, Muhammad Al-Agwany affirms that he continues to fulfill his mission in treating the wounded and the injured and in relieving the patients’ pain, no matter how great things get.