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Medics shocked by surging hospital attacks: MSF chief
By Nina LARSON
Geneva (AFP) Oct 3, 2016


Former Qaeda in Syria confirms a leader killed in raid
Washington (AFP) Oct 3, 2016 - The jihadist Fateh al-Sham Front, formerly Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, confirmed Monday that an air strike had killed a senior leader, after the Pentagon said it had targeted a "prominent" Al-Qaeda figure.

"Ahmed Salama, known as Abu Faraj the Egyptian and a member of the shura (consultative council) of Fateh al-Sham Front, was martyred after a coalition air strike in the west of Idlib province," the group said in a statement on the Telegram app.

Captain Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said a US strike had targeted a top Al-Qaeda leader on Monday, but he declined to discuss the target's identity until officials could confirm the strike was successful.

"We can confirm that we targeted a prominent Al-Qaeda member in Syria, and we are assessing the results of the operation at this time," Davis said.

"This is a prominent Al-Qaeda leader."

Ahmed Salama Mabrouk, an Egyptian also known by his nom de guerre Abu Faraj, was born in 1956 in the suburbs of Cairo and is known as a veteran Al-Qaeda leader and a commander of the Fateh al-Sham Front.

The group is a former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria previously known as Al-Nusra Front.

It split in July from the global jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden, in a move analysts said was aimed at easing pressure from both Moscow and Washington.

Though the Pentagon would not confirm the target was indeed Mabrouk, military officials do not consider Fateh al-Sham to truly have broken with Al-Qaeda.

"We are aware of al-Nusra's announced name change. The individuals that are there are still Nusra to us," Davis said.

"There's obviously close affiliations" to Al-Qaeda, he added.

Surging attacks on medical facilities in conflict zones have left health workers shocked beyond words, the MSF medical charity said Monday, after air strikes destroyed yet another Aleppo hospital.

"In the last 12 months, hospitals and clinics in Yemen and Syria have been destroyed at a rate that leaves the global medical community in speechless shock," said Joanna Liu, head of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF.

She was speaking at an event in Geneva marking the first anniversary of a deadly US bombing of an MSF hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz that killed 42 people, including 14 of the charity's staff.

"October 3 will remain a dark day," she said, adding that Monday's event at Geneva's main hospital was aimed at expressing "sadness, dismay, and also our outrage."

She voiced particular outrage that the attacks seemed to have multiplied since Kunduz, especially in the rebel-held east of the Syrian city of Aleppo, which is besieged and under attack by the regime and its ally Russia.

Earlier Monday, air strikes destroyed eastern Aleppo's biggest hospital, which had already been hit multiple times over the past week.

"Aleppo is on fire," Liu said, decrying daily bombings of hospitals and clinics in the rebel-held east even as the government siege has made it impossible to evacuate the critically wounded.

"Hospitals must never be targets of war," she insisted, calling on participants at Monday's event to respect a minute of silence for victims of attacks on medical facilities around the world.

- 'Scary precedent' -

Kathleen Thomas, an Australian intensive care doctor who survived last year's Kunduz bombing, also slammed the "complete disregard for international humanitarian law" in Syria and Yemen.

The hospital attacks "are setting a very alarming and scary precedent for the future of conflict zones," she told AFP.

The Kunduz bombing triggered global outrage and forced President Barack Obama to make a rare apology on behalf of the US military still deployed in war-torn Afghanistan.

MSF has said the raid lasted nearly an hour and left patients burning in their beds with some victims decapitated and suffering traumatic amputations.

The organisation has branded it a war crime, but an investigation by the US military earlier this year concluded that the troops targeted the facility by mistake.

MSF has repeatedly called for an independent international inquiry, but Thomas acknowledged she had lost hope any such probe would take place.

"This is just very difficult to accept," she said, adding that she remained "haunted" by all the friends she lost a year ago.

"I knew every single one of the people who died," she said, describing "four rooms absolutely overflowing with injured staff members," many of them dying with injuries similar to the ones they themselves had been treating for weeks.

She said her grief was worsened by her knowledge that the MSF trauma centre in Kunduz remains closed, even as conflict continues to rage in the area.

"My heart just sinks at the thought that the people of Kunduz still have no trauma centre to go to," Thomas said.


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