Doctors in Sweida, Syria, ask for help for hospital 'turned into mass grave'

"This is no longer a hospital; it's become a mass grave." Crying on the phone, Rouba, who is part of the medical staff at the only government hospital in the southern Syrian city of Sweida, pleads for help.
The center where he works is the only establishment that continues to operate in the city, which has a Druze majority.
"More than 400 bodies have arrived there since Monday morning," including "women, children and the elderly," doctor Omar Obeid told AFP.
"There is no more space in the morgue, the bodies are on the street," in front of the hospital, the doctor, who heads the Sweida section of the Order of Physicians, added by telephone.
On Sunday night, clashes broke out between Druze fighters and local Bedouin tribes before Syrian government forces intervened.
Witnesses, Druze groups, and NGOs accused the forces stationed in Sweida on Tuesday of committing abuses against the population. Two days later, faced with threats from Israel, which claims to protect the Druze, they withdrew from the city.
In the hospital corridors, bodies piled up give off a strong, nauseating odor, some so swollen they are practically unrecognizable, an AFP correspondent observed.
The small group of doctors and other health personnel who continue to work there are overwhelmed, but they struggle to care for the wounded who arrive without stopping.
“There are only nine doctors and medical staff working tirelessly,” assures Rouba, who prefers not to reveal his last name.
According to Rouba, “the situation is very bad, we have no water, no electricity, and medicines are starting to run out.”
“There are people who have been at home for three days and we have not been able to help them,” he added.
"The bodies are in the streets and no one can remove them. Yesterday, five large cars full of corpses arrived at the hospital," he said.
On Friday, the UN called for an end to the “bloodbath” and asked that the clashes be investigated “swiftly” and “transparently.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based NGO with a wide network of informants in Syria, the fighting has already left around 600 people dead.
Omar Obeid lost three of his colleagues in these clashes, one “was killed in his home, in front of his family,” and another, shot at point-blank range inside his car while crossing a security force blockade.
The last one, “surgeon Talaat Amer, died on Tuesday as he was going to the hospital, wearing a blue coat, to do his job,” he said.
"They shot him in the head. Then they called his wife and said: your husband was wearing a surgical cap, which is now red."
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