A team of British doctors set off for the Syrian border yesterday in a convoy carrying medical equipment needed to rebuild a children’s hospital on the outskirts of Aleppo.
Crowds of wellwishers and medical staff waved off the lorry, dubbed “the People’s Convoy”, from outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
The convoy, which will take equipment such as incubators, cots and sterilisers, will be met at the Turkey-Syria border by members of the Independent Doctors Association (IDA). They will travel on with the aim of turning a dilapidated building in the countryside north of Aleppo into a children’s hospital.
The team, which has raised more than £150,000 to fund the new hospital, is led by Rola Hallam, a British-Syrian consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
They were joined by the photographer Paul Conroy who had been with Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times foreign correspondent, when she was killed in Homs in February 2012.
Advertisement
Conroy has not returned to Syria since the attack, in which he was injured. He said medics were some of the “most hunted” people in Syria.
For Hallam, who was raised in Damascus and has helped to build five hospitals in Syria, the People’s Convoy is a response to SOS calls from colleagues in Syria who had run out of supplies to treat patients.
She said the idea came to her after the latest hospital bombing in Aleppo made her realise that “’a hospital was bombed in Syria’ has become such a normal sentence”.
The IDA said the new hospital will be able to treat about 60,000 children. At least 2,000 people from the city are believed to have arrived in the area around the hospital in recent days.
Hallam did not reveal the exact location for fear it would be bombed by the Syrian regime: “That tells you how shocking the situation is.”