Regime targets doctors treating wounded — MSF

Paris: The Syrian regime is persecuting the doctors and health workers treating wounded demonstrators and denying medical care to its opponents, aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said.

"In Syria today, wounded patients and doctors are pursued and risk torture and arrest at the hands of the security services," MSF president Marie-Pierre Allie said on Wednesday. "Medicine is being used as a weapon of persecution."

The agency said it was not able to work inside Syria, where Bashar Al Assad's forces are brutally suppressing a revolt, but had interviewed witnesses who escaped to seek treatment in neighbouring states.

"Most of the wounded do not go to public hospitals, for fear of being tortured or arrested. When a wounded person is admitted to a hospital, a false name is sometimes used to hide his or her identity," the group said.

"Doctors sometimes provide a false diagnosis to help patients elude security forces, which search for patients with wounds consistent with those sustained in protests and demonstrations."

Medical facilities attacked

Allie demanded that hospitals be protected as neutral ground where the wounded of both sides can seek treatment, and accused the authorities of attacking ad hoc medical facilities set up by the opposition.

"The security services attack and destroy the mobile hospitals," said a Syrian doctor, cited anonymously in the MSF statement. "They enter houses looking for drugs and medical supplies."

"We are constantly being pursued by the security forces," said another Syrian doctor. "Many doctors who treated wounded patients in their private hospitals have been arrested and tortured."

Syria has been in turmoil for almost a year, after pro-democracy protests erupted as part of the Arab Spring series of revolts in the region. Human rights groups estimate that at least 6,000 people have been killed.

Failed UN vote

UN rights chief Navi Pillay called on Wednesday for urgent international action to protect civilians in Syria, as troops continued to shell Homs city, a centre of protest in the country.

"I am appalled by the Syrian government's wilful assault on Homs, and its use of artillery and other heavy weaponry in what appear to be indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas in the city," said a statement from Pillay.

"The failure of the Security Council to agree on firm collective action appears to have fuelled the Syrian government's readiness to massacre its own people in an effort to crush dissent," the statement added.

Pillay, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed the "extreme urgency for the international community to cut through the politics and take effective action to protect the Syrian population."

Syria's army has sharply increased its use of tanks, helicopters, mortars, rockets and gunfire to attack civilians in Homs, according to accounts from local sources, her office said.

There are reports that hospitals are now overwhelmed or inaccessible and people have set up makeshift clinics throughout the city, said the statement.