For many Americans, horrific images of children bloodied and battered by Syria's civil war have driven outrage and financial support. But for a number of Chicago-based physicians, the conflict in Syria and the oath they took to save lives have converged in their homeland.
Half a dozen Chicago-area doctors have crept across the Syrian border to underground hospitals, risking their own lives amid bombs and bloodshed to stitch wounds, revive heartbeats and wrap the children they can't save in white shrouds.
"We will treat anyone who is a victim of this crisis," said Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a critical care lung specialist at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn and a former national president of the Syrian American Medical Society who has been on nearly 30 trips to the region since the conflict began.
Hundreds of others — doctors, nurses and dentists from across the country — have gone to refugee camps on medical missions organized by the Chicago-based Midwest chapter of the medical society. While most relief organizations have focused their attention on refugee camps outside Syria, the group is one of the few organizations offering undercover and unsanctioned humanitarian aid in rebel-controlled regions within Syria as well as refugee camps in neighboring Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
In addition to 15 missions to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Greece and Turkey, Sahloul has gone inside Syria 14 times, most recently in June with two other Chicago colleagues. He tried to cross the border again in January to check on those evacuated to Idlib from Aleppo, but Turkish border control turned him away.
While his wife and children know when he is traveling to Syria and the region, he does not tell his parents, who live in Syria, for fear of what the government might do to them. Sahloul said the trips do take a toll, even on doctors who deal with life and death in Chicago every day.
"It's different when you see children victims of barrel bombs. or victims of chemical weapons or doctors being killed," said Sahloul, who was raised in Syria. "I cried. I never cried before."
Sahloul said the missions are not intended to be a political statement about Syrian President Bashar Assad, who graduated from the medical school at Damascus University with Sahloul in 1988.
Regardless of whether victims fled as refugees or remain in their homeland, the moral obligation is the same, said Sahloul: "It's saving Syrian lives."
Dr. Samer Attar, 41, an orthopedic surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, told no one about his June trip to Aleppo. In addition to packing scrubs and a toothbrush, he wrote a farewell letter to his family and gave it to a friend in case he did not return.
The sound of bullets, bombs and missiles were constant background noise as he worked in Aleppo's largest trauma center. With bombs falling nearby, the hospital regularly shook as doctors operated on patients, repairing broken bones and amputating limbs.
"Some days we'd be so overrun there would be no place to step," said Attar, an American-born son of Syrian immigrants who didn't want to look back in 20 years and say he wasn't part of the relief effort in the country of his heritage. "I still get chills thinking of people pounding on the doors trying to get into the hospital to be taken care of."
The Syrian American Medical Society, which has a national office based in Washington, D.C., has coordinated relief work by medical associations around the world and 14 other Syrian-American groups, including engineers who work to restore clean water and electricity in rebel-controlled regions. It helps run 110 medical facilities, including clinics and field hospitals, formerly government-run facilities moved underground to care for the injured. The organization has grown from $70,000 in annual expenses and 60 members in 2011 to a $25 million budget and a constituency of 1,900 health care providers.
In addition to providing care and supplies, volunteers deliver firsthand reports from inside a nation that has become a battleground for the Syrian government, rebels, ISIS and Kurds. In many regions, civilians, doctors and hospitals have been under attack.
Physicians for Human Rights has documented the deaths of 796 medical personnel and 454 attacks on 310 separate medical facilities since March 2011.
"In modern times, there has not been the kind of assault on health care professionals like we've seen in Syria," said Stephen Fee, a spokesman for the watchdog group, who said SAMS has helped fill the void. "That's really where their hearts are, realizing how dire the situation is for colleagues in Syria, how endangered they are there. Nowhere else in the world has the assault been so systematic."
The Syrian American Medical Society started in 1998 as an organization for Syrian health care providers in diaspora. It partnered with the Syrian government's ministries of health and higher education to hold conferences and medical missions to underserved areas throughout the country. That collaborative relationship ended when it evolved into a humanitarian aid agency, Sahloul said, and members are no longer welcome in Syria.
The decision to shift the purpose of the professional association in 2012 did not have universal support within the group. Shortly after Sahloul became national president in 2011, his medical mission to five refugee camps in Turkey caused a rift, he said. Nearly half of the members resigned in protest, some believing such missions were too political for doctors to undertake. Others interpreted the trip as an offense to Assad, once a supportive colleague.
"At the time we weren't sure whether this is right or wrong or what to expect and (where) that would lead," said Sahloul, an American citizen who lives in Burr Ridge. "But I had to believe, if you focus on serving people in need and if you mute the noise from all sides and focus on your mission, then you will succeed."
More than 400 medical professionals, most of them not Syrian, are now on a waiting list to go on missions coordinated by the Syrian American Medical Society, and often based on specialties. A recent trip to a refugee camp in Jordan featured 50 neurologists, orthopedists, plastic surgeons and dentists.
"People want to do something. They want a vehicle to transfer their sympathy to the Syrian people and help refugees," said Sahloul, who oversees the relief effort from Chicago. "Even if you reject military intervention you can't say no to medicine."
Dr. Anu Shivaraju, 41, an interventional cardiologist at Advocate Christ, said she had been on a number of missions around the world since medical school. When she read the news about Syria, she wanted to offer her expertise.
Since premature coronary disease is common in the Middle East, she proposed getting access to a hospital where she could install catheters and stents. Within two months, access was granted, catheters and stents were donated and she was on her way to Jordan, where about 70 patients already had been identified by the Syrian American Medical Society staff there.
"Even though we truly put in 14 or 15 hours a day, never once do you feel tired," said Shivaraju, who is not Syrian. She has traveled back to Jordan three times and plans to head to Lebanon later this year. "This is my moral duty and responsibility to do this."
Jihad Shoshara, 47, a pediatrician from Naperville, returned in mid-April from leading the mission of 50 to Jordan. The son of a Syrian father who came to the U.S. in 1966, Shoshara studied in Syria during college and later vacationed there as a young adult. A father of three, Shoshara had wanted to return to humanitarian work since serving victims of the war in Bosnia.
"It's a bittersweet coincidence that it's happening in a situation that affects me personally," said Shoshara, who has gone on three missions to refugee camps in Jordan. "I have family that's been displaced. A lot of the places where these refugees come from, I've been to. It's a little bit more intense in that sense."
Attar, the Northwestern surgeon who has traveled to Syria three times, said he always feels like he leaves a piece of himself behind and fears for the well-being of the doctors, nurses and school teachers who chose to stay with their communities.
"I was given the access and the opportunity to … help the people and the culture who are part of me and in my blood, to stand in solidarity with those locals," he said. "I can't stop this war, but I will stand beside them."
