The battles of the Syrian pediatrician Amani Ballour

Text by: RFI Follow

This young Syrian pediatrician ran an underground hospital in the rebellious Ghouta region near Damascus, until the Bashar al-Assad regime recaptured this area. Doctor Amani Ballour is now living in exile and the documentary “The Cave” tells his story.

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Doctor Ballour's voice remains calm and soft, even when she remembers the worst moments of the siege of Ghouta. " I remember a 5 year old child who lost his hand and he asked me 'why did you cut my hand?' It is very difficult to answer that, very difficult to explain. When they arrived at the emergency room with serious injuries, I could not look at their eyes or listen to them. I was trying to focus on injuries, my job as a doctor. It is not easy of course, but I had no choice ”.

The fine, almost childlike features, framed by a scarf, Amani Ballour is visiting Paris. The young woman, a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine in Damascus, was not thirty years old when her country plunged into war. In 2013, she witnessed the deadly chemical attack on Ghouta . In the rebel zone, she treated the wounded before being chosen by her colleagues to direct the underground hospital in Douma. “When we were saving a life, when we were helping a child, it encouraged us to keep going. We felt that we were useful, that people needed us, ”says Amani Ballour, who stayed in Ghouta until 2018, the date of the fall of this rebel stronghold.

The Cave

The civilian victims of the bombings and chemical attacks, the shortages of drugs, the overwhelmed medical teams, the plight of the population, then the forced exile before the Syrian regime's army , all this is told in "The Cave", a documentary by Syrian director Firas Fayyad. The film follows the frail figure of Doctor Ballour, between scenes of horror in the emergency department and landscapes devastated after the bombing. However, the pediatrician began by refusing to allow a team to film his underground hospital, before changing his mind: " After years of siege, bombing and food shortages and when no one was doing anything for us, I was really desperate. And there I agreed to tell people the truth. The Assad regime kept lying by saying that it was fighting terrorists. We were not terrorists, but civilians and they bombed hospitals and schools, but not the positions of armed groups. I wanted people to know the truth, and I ended up saying yes. "

Doctor Amani Ballour in a corridor of the underground Ghouta hospital near Damascus. Nicole Cappello (21st Century Fox)

Girls education

In "The Cave", we also discover the pediatrician's difficulties in gaining respect as a female hospital director in a conservative environment. Today is Amani Ballour's new fight: exiled abroad, she launches her foundation, Al Amal ("hope" in Arabic). “ The main objective is to support women and girls in conflict zones and particularly in Syria. What I experienced in my community - when I started running the hospital - was that many men, many people did not accept it, because I am a woman! And we can say that everywhere in Syria women suffer from this image. They are considered to have to stay at home, get married and have children. We have to change that, supporting women is supporting the whole community. So we have to educate women . ”

"The Cave" was selected in the documentary category at the Oscars this year. After the United States, Doctor Amani Ballour is currently in Europe where she multiplies meetings in order to alert on the situation of civilians in Syria, especially in the Idleb region.

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