Inside Syria’s former ISIL bases converted to treat COVID
Al JazeeraThe coronavirus is surging in a region of northern Syria struggling from the devastating effect of a near-decade of war. “We equipped the centre in a month to treat moderate cases of coronavirus and on November 20 it was ready,” Obeid Muslim, head of the Health Committee of Tabqa in the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, told Al Jazeera. We are not equipped for intensive care yet.” The Tabqa and Manbij centres are managed by the KRC in collaboration with Un Ponte Per, an Italian NGO that – in addition to Doctors Without Borders, Syrian Relief and Medical Relief for Syria – is fighting COVID-19 in the region. According to the North East Syria Forum, a joint initiative of NGOs operating in the region, by December 9, there were a total of 7,322 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Rojava, comprising 6,035 active cases, 1,063 recoveries and 224 deaths. “We know of people who died from COVID, but we are not afraid,” says a street vendor in Manbij, a city where ISIL sleeper cells are still present, located about 10km from areas controlled by Turkish-backed armed groups and 20km from the territory controlled by the Syrian government’s forces.
History of this topic
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