The Physicians For Human Rights “Report” on “Aleppo” Is A Scam

Nov 18, 2015, Moon of Alabama

One of the organizations providing anti-Syrian propaganda is the U.S. based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) which claims to be “Using science and medicine to stop human rights violations”.

It used neither in its most recent pamphlet about “Aleppo” which fraudulently asserts that a tiny piece of the city is representative for all of it. The NYT short piece on that “report” says:

A New York-based human rights organization is accusing the Syrian government of flouting international law by killing health workers, bombing hospitals and blocking lifesaving aid from entering a strategic city in northern Syria that was held by the opposition groups.In a report released Wednesday, the group, Physicians for Human Rights, chronicled 45 attacks on medical facilities in Aleppo since 2012, mostly by Syrian government forces.

The report paints a harrowing picture of the risks to those who provide basic medical services in Aleppo. A barrel bomb killed a doctor and a public health worker who were vaccinating children against polio in early 2014 — the first of 26 airstrikes on medical facilities.
…
The report says that 95 percent of Aleppo’s doctors have fled or been killed. The group also says that Russian airstrikes have hit 10 medical facilities since the air campaign began in September.

The NYT piece is only about “Aleppo” and fails to differentiate between the insurgent held eastern part and the government held western part.

That may have been because the PHR press release on its “report” also only speaks of “Aleppo”. It claims:

A new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) shows the devastating impact of the Syrian conflict on Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city and the area that has been the hardest hit in terms of attacks on medical facilities. In the past three years, Aleppo has suffered 45 attacks on health care facilities, more than two-thirds of hospitals no longer function there, and roughly 95 percent of doctors have fled, been detained or killed. Today’s ratio of doctors to residents is eight times less than what it was before the conflict began, and this extreme shortage of health professionals is exacerbating the already dire humanitarian crisis.

That press release is intentionally deceiving and the NYT writer fell for the scam.

Only deep in the longer PHR report (pdf) do we find what area the report is really about:

This report focuses on the state of health care in eastern Aleppo city⁴..

The footnote 4 at the end of the report says:

Eastern Aleppo city is referred to as “Aleppo” in the remainder of this report. Any references to western (government-controlled) Aleppo city or Aleppo governorate are noted explicitly.

Eastern Aleppo is bombed out Jihadi held part of Aleppo. It is practically empty except for the Jihadis and a few members of their families. In March the Guardian’s Martin Chulov actually visited eastern Aleppo. He wrote:

Western Aleppo has had by far the better of the war, with civic services still functioning in most neighbourhoods and war damage minimal. Much of the east, though, is ravaged and empty.
…
Those who remain in eastern Aleppo, roughly 40,000 from a prewar population estimated at about a million, have been without electricity or running water for more than a year.

A recent Reuters report about a supply route to west Aleppo gives the number of inhabitants there:

The road is the army’s supply route to government-held western parts of Aleppo, home to around 2 million people.

The PHR report is about an area where maybe 40,000 people live while claiming to be about “Syria’s most populous city”. But the report says nothing about the government held area with 2 million people. It is only looking at the damaged empty parts of the city and pretends that these are representative for the whole city.

It also purely based on hearsay provided by insurgency supporters:

The findings in this report are based primarily on interviews conducted by PHR in Gaziantep and Kilis, Turkey from July 22 to July 30, 2015. The research team conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 individuals providing health care, supporting the health care system, or documenting events in Aleppo.

The report does not say how many of those 24 individuals were actually “providing health care” and how many were just “documenting events in Aleppo”, i.e. professional propagandists for the Jihadi side. None of the authors of the report has actually been in Aleppo east or west.

The whole pamphlet is highly misleading and one sided propaganda with can neither satisfy “scientific” nor “medical” standards. It is ridiculous, though not unexpected, that the media will uncritically distribute its claims by copy-pasting the misleading PHR press release without actually reading the report.