REYHANLI, TURKEY -As the Assad regime continues to conduct air strikes on rebel-held medical facilities, Syrian doctors across the border are hindered by government and banking regulations. 

Bombing just over the hill in Syria shakes buildings on this Turkish border town’s farthest-most edge. A small lake shimmers just below the steep rocky climb up the hill some take to get in, bypassing the need for passports, explanations and time-consuming permits. Others wait for a moment of distraction on the part of Turkish border guards a few kilometres down, next to the official crossing, and slip though a hole cut into the wire fence, to then make their way around the whitewashed concrete walls covered with spikes and up a burnt-sienna hill lined with gnarled olive trees that serve as scant protection against being seen.

Weapons and refugees are not the only things smuggled through this area bordering a war zone - much-needed medical supplies and doctors are as well. Over 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict underway for the past 21 months, and the Syrian regime has reportedly systematically targeted hospitals and pharmacies in rebel-held areas. The destruction of Aleppo’s Dar Al-Shifa hospital on November 21 was only one of the better-documented cases, by virtue of its being one of the only places injured civilians and fighters could receive treatment in Syria’s second largest city.

After spending a number of days in towns in rebel-held areas of the north-eastern Syrian province Idlib, a region subject to daily bombing by regime forces, this correspondent spoke to Syrians in Reyhanli who had been forced to flee their home country and were now working to help those still inside. A number of them were doctors and pharmacists involved in the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations (UOSSM), professionals wanted by the regime for providing treatment to injured rebels or to those living in areas where opposition to the regime was strong.

‘’All of us have either been arrested or are wanted by the regime,’’ I was told by one of them, a pharmacist from Taftanaz who spent time in jail on suspicion of providing medicine to wounded anti-government protestors in the spring of 2011 before fleeing the country. He now goes back in to areas held by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to distribute medical supplies. ‘’You’re sitting with a bunch of ‘terrorists’,’’ he said with a short laugh, using the blanket term with which the regime in Damascus refers to all those in the opposition. After his arrest his pharmacy was razed to the ground. He preferred not to give his real name.

The UOSSM is a non-governmental, independent umbrella group of 14 medical and relief organisations created to provide medical and humanitarian aid to the Syrian population, and includes hundreds of doctors of mainly Syrian origins from Europe, Canada, the U.S. and a number of Arab countries. The first conference was held secretly in Reyhanli in November 2011, while the first official one was in Paris in January 2012.

The organisation provides medical supplies to several hospitals and field clinics in rebel-held areas, arranges to bring severely injured Syrians across the border for treatment, runs several care centres in the Turkish town, pays the salaries of doctors at hospitals inside and brings in volunteer specialist doctors from abroad to work for ten-day or two-week stints, some of whom are now training those left inside Syrian territory vital life-saving techniques.  Most of its funding comes from private donors, though the French and Canadian embassy, among others, have provided some funding.

Their office manager in Turkey, Wassim Taha, told the Insider that a number of their ambulances had been targeted. ‘’For the Assad regime, medical facilities are always an ideal target. Killing a doctor is better than killing dozens of fighters,’’ he said, as what would normally be minor injuries can be lethal when there is no access to professional care. He could not immediately provide the number of field hospitals and private ones helped or run by the organisation, as ‘’due to attacks and a constantly shifting front line’’, the number varies.

Taha said that though insufficient funding was an issue, what he referred to as ‘’politics’’ was also a major obstacle in getting medical aid in. He claimed that 5 tonnes of medical equipment and medicines provided by donors had recently been held up at the Istanbul airport for seven months. By the time clearance was obtained, 3.5 tonnes of it had already expired. He also pointed to an incident in which aid was to have arrived from Bulgaria, but due to regulations the cargo would have had to go to Iskenderun and then down to Latakia. As the city is still under regime control, getting it to the population in need in FSA-controlled areas would have been impossible. U.S. and U.K. banking laws have also created numerous difficulties for Syrian ex-pats wanting to fund their activities, said Taha.

MD M. Hassan Mughrabieh, the secretary general of one of the UOSSM’s member organisations, the Syrian Expatriate Medical Association (SEMA), has been active since the very beginning in trying to help his fellow Syrians from Saudi Arabia, where he made his home after completing his studies in France. After detailing the atrocious conditions found in the areas he had recently been volunteering in and speaking of his plans to try to train more doctors in the border area, he noted that most of the Syrian ex-pats he is now working with he hadn’t ever met before the revolution, and that he had been amazed by the solidarity shown by so many Syrians abroad.

Other ex-pats working from Reyhanli with whom the Insider spoke include a Syrian businessman who left a successful import-export business in Romania to lend his negotiating and organisational skills to the ‘’cause’’, as well as Yakzan Shishakly, the Syrian-American director of the Maram Foundation who left his air-conditioning business in Houston, Texas, to set up a refugee camp inside Syrian territory. As Turkey’s refugee camps have filled, only the most at risk are currently being allowed to cross the border and thousands are stranded on the other side in Syrian territory.

A certain degree of resentment has also been growing among the mostly Alawite population of Turkey’s Hatay region, where Reyhanli is located. Historically, the Hatay region was part of the Ottoman Empire before coming under the purview of the French Mandate of Syria, only to later become part of Turkey in 1939. The region and especially its capital, Antakya, have the largest percentage of Alawite (the religious group to which the Assad family and most of the Syrian regime’s officers belong) inhabitants in the country, and some have long looked up to the Assad regime as a bulwark against the conservative Sunni Islamic drift of Turkey’s governing AKP party. 

Meanwhile, as the winter cold sets in and rebels gain ground only to continue being pummelled by Syrian regime airstrikes, many international NGOs are working exclusively in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon and not in the country itself, resulting in a void which could prove deadly for many not killed directly by attacks. With most of the hospitals in territory held by the FSA either destroyed, severely damaged or subject to constant attacks, many people will continue to rely on the generosity of Syrians overseas and what they can afford to send, as well as their ability to get vital supplies and doctors in any way possible.