Episode 46 - Treating the Wounded fleeing ISIS in Southern Syria

 

 

On the ground in Syria covering the last days of the ISIS caliphate, I’m Chuck Holton and this is the Hot Zone. 

 

These are captured IED that the Syrian defense forces picked up that were made by ISIS. These  cases were meant for light and they took them. They mixed up this kind of homemade plastic explosive here very very toxic and packed these IEDs these metal cases full of this explosive put a detonator charge in here and all it needs now is an electrical current to set these off. You can see all these things we're being told that in the area where the worst fighting is right now that there are IEDs like this everywhere that they are attached to light switches and attached to pressure plates and everything out there they told us Don't go anywhere that hasn't already been cleared because these things are very very dangerous obviously. 

 

This could easily kill a man. 

 

These are a different kind of IED that's on a stake here with an explosive charge here and the electrical wire like this. These things are probably the biggest threat out there right now to the people who are trying to clear this area and it will eventually be a threat to the civilians who try to move back in that area once ISIS is gone. 

 

Good morning everybody. I do want to just show you a little bit around what it's like out here in southern Syria. It's just after sun up and we're camping inside a I don't know kind of a circle of dirt berms that was pushed up by bulldozers in the advance as they were pushing ISIS out of this area maybe several weeks ago. I'm not sure how how long ago it was but not look not too long ago. 

 

There are just a few SDF troops sort of stationed here as a little outpost. And I'm not really supposed to show those guys but you can see our camp back behind us. We're just kind of circled our vehicles and they're s tarting to make breakfast now and people are going for runs and doing their morning routine. And I just want to walk over here and kind of show you what it looks like because you might be able to see why some of these podcasts are just audio podcasts it's just not really much to look at. However let me tell you a little bit about what we did yesterday. Just to give you a sense of just the kind of work that is being done out here.

 

If you take that forward line of troops the front line the actual fighting that's happening against the remnants of ISIS in a place called dairies or in southern Syria. There are still thousands of people that are stuck in those areas and they are mostly ISIS supporters. They're the diehard ISIS fighters and their families essentially. But many of them are realizing now that they're going to die if they stay in there. And when it really comes down to that although they probably pledged that they would die many of them are kind of deciding that might not be the best course of action. And so they are giving themselves up to the SDF troops maybe partially because they realized that if they go to the other side of the river or are captured by Assad's forces that it's going to go even worse for them. And so their only hope for staying alive is to give themselves up to the Syrian defense forces over here so when they do many times those diehards that are left behind still fighting get angry about that or they don't like that. And so they light them up as they're trying to escape and have killed and injured many people. So this truck arrived last night with a family that was fleeing ISIS. And they say that ISIS shot in their vehicle as they were trying to get away and really shot the vehicle up badly. Several people in the family are injured and right here under these blankets these eight old girl arrived last night alive but she just passed away. She just died and her mother and her sisters were obviously very distraught right now. This is the kind of thing that we're seeing. ISIS is not a very vindictive against people who are trying to leave. And they're saying also that they're charging money they're saying if you want to leave you have to pay thousands of dollars to try to get out of here. And they're taking them for everything that they have left before they allow them to go. Whether or not they get shot at by their own people many of them are already wounded because of the fighting over the last several weeks. And so they have to once they give themselves up they're checked for explosives and that sort of thing and then they're sent they say just you know walk that direction a couple maybe a mile or so until you get to a collection point and that's where we've been for the last several days is at that collection point picking these people up. They come in. They're in extremely extremely bad shape. It's hard to even describe how bad it is for them. And they show up with whatever they can carry. And they really don't have much just blankets and stuff. There are some men who were undoubtedly ISIS fighters in the past and are now just broken men and really really broken. And the women and children that are there lots of women and children mostly. I would say pretty young all that's kind of hard to tell because they are wearing nothing but. I mean you know they're wearing their burqas absolutely completely covered from head to toe wearing black gloves black veils everything. The children are dirty disheveled exhausted dehydrated sick and many of them injured. And so Dave Eubanks and his crew are treating them treating these wounded. Helping them however they can. It's just really a powerful emotionally draining experience because there are people yesterday and a young lady who died after we got there. She she was badly injured and she passed away 19 year old girl. And then we were there with her family as they mourned cried and wailed. Many of them were also wounded. There was a maybe a 2 year old boy who had been shot through the abdomen his intestines were spilling out. We were trying to treat that help help that boy. There was another boy who came in who was gravely injured just horribly injured in many places on his body to include as part of his skull missing and just shot through the head and shrapnel wounds in his legs as his genitals just bear in really bad shape and I we knew he had to get out of there very quickly. So we tried to coordinate with U.S. troops to get some help. They were not allowed to help. They're only allowed to to help with any American forces who are hurt. And then we coordinated with the SDF. They finally allowed us to put them in one of our ambulances several of the worst cases and drive them an hour to the nearest clinic. So I'm driving in an ambulance with the Free Burma Rangers who are here providing medical aid to the people coming out of the worst hit areas. They're down on the frontlines. And we've got an ambulance full of wounded. We have a little boy who was hit very badly by shrapnel. We have a woman where she 24 24 year old woman who her husband was killed. Her daughter was killed and she is badly wounded as well. And then there's a baby with shrapnel wounds to the stomach and its intestines are kind of coming out. And so we were going to try to get these people to the hospital as soon as we can and we have a FBR medic back there that's been treating them and keeping them alive this long. If it weren't for them these people might already be dead. We might as well not even bother with that clinic because when we got there they didn't have any supplies or any doctors. And if that place was absolutely like just a like a slaughterhouse and it was terrible but they did have a ambulance and they agreed to take these patients to the nearest hospital which is another two hours from there. So as you think about that there is absolutely no medical pipeline. There's no ambulance service. There's no life. There's nothing for civilians out here. That's less than three or four hours away. And that's kind of hard to wrap your brain around because these people are coming gravely injured and there's just no way for them to get any medical care. And I saw some wounds yesterday that in the states would have been absolute priority stat get these people into intensive care and they were walking around with those wounds having received them maybe three weeks ago and had no medical care whatsoever. It's kind of hard to to fathom the truth. So anyway I just wanted to bring you up here and show you what this looks like. You can see behind me it's absolutely nothing. This is just this flat plane as far as you can see. They rotate around here. You'll see part of the little outpost where we're at some kind of a guard post right there behind me and a whole lot more nothing. We're maybe five miles from the I'm sorry. Probably closer to 10 miles right now from the fighting. And this is where we've been staying because it's a secure location and we're just camping out here. It's brutally cold. It's probably below 40 degrees out here right now. And so many of these IDP that are coming out of the affected areas are literally freezing to death. I saw five graves yesterday of local people who had I'm told frozen to death out there in the area where we're treating these people because it just is so brutally cold. So this guy is taking me to the place where they buried four babies that died several days ago out here in this first collection point for people fleeing out of the last stronghold from ISIS.

 

You know maybe a woman woman woman man maybe one man. Man to man woman man woman. So these graves are two adults and three babies that died here when four days ago four days four days four days ago. Thank you for being a part of this. I just wanted to try to show you a little bit about what we're doing here and I'll I'll show you more as I get a chance to. And so thanks for being part of the hot zone. The Hot Zone is produced by Amy Holton and live fire media. Copyright 2019.