Children’s Hospital Bombed in Syria Amidst Massive Civilian Casualties from US Air Strikes

By Matt Agorist

On Monday of last week, airstrikes, led by US coalition forces, killed 21 innocent civilians in Manbij’s northern Hazawneh quarter in Syria. On the following Tuesday, additional strikes in the region killed 56 more, including multiple children.

Prior to the strikes last week, more than 100 civilians have already been killed in Manbij in only a short time by US bombs — nearly half of them children.

On Friday, another tragic air strike hit the Save the Children-supported maternity hospital in Idlib. This hospital serves over 1,300 women and performs over 300 deliveries each month.

Save the Children said the strike hit the front of the hospital building, at a time when two operations were under way and a woman was in labor, according to Al Jazeera.

“Several babies were injured when their incubators crashed to the floor, and a woman who was six months pregnant had her leg severed,” Save the Children said in a statement.

“Two other women have shrapnel wounds to the stomach and a number of patients and staff have suffered light injuries.”

Also on Friday, immediately following the strikes on the hospital, more details surfaced on at least 28 civilians who have reportedly been killed and several wounded in US-led air strikes on the suburbs of Manbij, slightly northeast of Idlib.

Friday’s state-sponsored murder of civilians comes only one day after the US-led coalition announced it had enough evidence of civilian casualties from its attacks on the same area last week to launch a formal investigation.

Save the Children posted the following short video immediately after the attack on the hospital.

“The bomb hit the entrance to the hospital, which is the biggest in the area, serving over 1,300 women monthly,” a spokeswoman for the charity told Al Jazeera on Friday.

“Bombing a maternity hospital which is helping women living under the shadow of war to give birth safely is a shameful act, whether it was done intentionally or because due care was not taken to avoid civilian areas,” Sonia Khush, Syria director for Save the Children, said.

According to the spokesperson with Save the Children, the total number of casualties is currently unknown as well as who carried out the direct hit on an international charity hospital devoted to children.

However, the deaths of these innocent men, women, and children will, and likely already have been, written off as collateral damage in the war on terror.

The US military will claim that Islamic militants hide among the population to deliberately cause civilian casualties during coalition strikes. However, they conveniently ignore the fact that it is coalition bombs killing the civilians.

Before the assault on Syria from the west, Syria had vibrant, bustling marketplaces in the old cities of Damascus and Aleppo. The country boasted its own innovative IT industry despite economic sanctions imposed by the West.

Terror attacks were all but non-existent and the people certainly never feared bombs falling from the sky — especially onto children’s hospitals. However, all that changed after the ambitions of the military industrial complex became reality.

In depressing irony, the West continues to fail to realize the cause of terrorism and instead focus on fighting the symptoms. Americans, especially, continue to buy into the notion that the terrorists hate our freedom.

If you truly believe that terrorism exists as a revolt against the West’s freedoms, you’d do well to look around. If they actually hated our freedoms, then they must love us now as American’s lose freedoms now on a near daily basis.

However, this over-used and ill-conceived euphemism for the wholesale export of murder has been very effective at blinding Americans to the actual plight of war.

Only through educating ourselves and others about who is behind this theater of constant war and terror, will we ever begin to stop it. Continued dehumanization of Middle Eastern people and more war will only serve to fuel the flames of terrorism. It’s high time American citizens stand up and bravely say — no more war.

Matt Agorist is the co-founder of TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared. He is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world.

Follow @MattAgorist