In early December, I spoke with Dr. Husam al-Samman, a Syrian doctor living in the United States, about issues pertaining to the health care system in Syria; about the early days in Syria–when corporate media claimed the protests were peaceful–and about the criminal western sanctions on Syria, which prevent even the delivery of critically-needed medicines, including Dr. al-Samman’s attempt to deliver medicines for cancer remission patients to Syria and being literally blocked from doing so, in spite of his tireless and heroic efforts, by the United States.
Dr. al-Samman finished his medical studies in Damascus, and during the early years of the war on Syria, was returning to Damascus (from Saudi Arabia where he lived at the time) every two weeks. What he saw and experienced was starkly opposite what corporate and Gulf media were reporting. He gave a personal example of his family nearly coming under fire from “peaceful” revolutionary types when they were passing through Madaya in mid-2011–his family was saved by a Syrian soldier who ran into the open waving his arms and telling them to turn their cars around. His fate is unknown, but it is likely he was killed in the terrorist firing he was saving the family from.
We also talked about an article that came out recently–written by none other than the wife of Ken Roth (the 2 decades dictator of Human Rights Watch (with a terrible sense of geography–Gaza is not Syria…), attacking Syria’s health care system–a system which provides free health care to all citizens and which is still functioning after nearly 8 years of war on Syria, after terrorist attacks on hospitals and health care workers, after criminal western sanctions on Syria.
*We did speak for over an hour, however the sound quality was unfortunately not great always, so I’ve had to cut out murky bits. However, the remaining content is still fascinating, well worth listening to.