In the battle to retake Mosul, MSF was forced to witness the expendability of human life […]
Isabelle Defourny and Christine Jamet: The bitter taste of Mosul
Category: MSF
Farrah Kashfipour: The waiting room art gallery
We collected hundreds of drawings—snapshots of an often overlooked corner of the world through the eyes of sick children […]
Monika Gattinger: How can Europe be more traumatising than Mosul?
The people living in Moria, a refugee camp in Greece, have been abandoned by Europe and treated like criminals for nothing more than wanting to be safe […]
Lulwa Al-Kilani: From one refugee to another, I hope you can go home soon
Since the start of the civil war, 165 000 South Sudanese refugees have fled the violence at home and crossed the border into Sudan’s White Nile state. Lulwa Al-Kilani, a Palestinian project manager with medical humanitarian organisation Medécins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), has been working in the Al Kashafa refugee camp hospital in White […]
Melissa McRae: Yemen still remains an afterthought for the international community
The scale of suffering in Yemen is hard to grasp, but should be impossible to ignore […]
Rohingya refugee crisis—Emergency response is what MSF does, and does well
The first thing that strikes you is their silence. The Rohingya are quiet, placid, and polite. They endure, accept, and hope. We hear repeatedly, stories of their men taken away, their women raped, and their villages burned. They have escaped over mountains and through rivers; sustained injuries, dehydration and malnutrition; and have finally reached a […]
Salah Ibrahim Dongu’du: Too few organisations are responding to huge needs in war-torn Yemen
I recently completed my third humanitarian mission in Yemen with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). I arrived in April 2015, just after the war escalated and the bombing started. During most of my 20 months in the country I have been in Taiz managing MSF’s operations in the city during incessant fighting. The humanitarian needs are […]
New plan to tackle the global shortage of health workers fails to address economic constraints
The Five-Year Action Plan for Health Employment and Inclusive Economic Growth from the World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was recently adopted. It was developed from the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030. [1,2] Together, the global strategy and the action plan address issues around the uneven distribution […]
Kathleen Thomas: Hospital bombardment—the new weapon of war?
It’s been 18 months since I witnessed the decimation of our fully functional hospital in Kunduz, Northern Afghanistan by aerial bombardment. I still can’t find words to adequately describe the all-consuming panic, nauseating fear, and chest-clutching grief that clouded my judgement as I darted between my friends, my colleagues, their dying bodies ripped apart by […]
Jonathan Whittall: Medics as force multipliers around Mosul—at the expense of medical ethics?
The battle for Mosul is taking place in a densely populated urban centre. Thousands of people are being injured in the crossfire—by explosions, snipers, and air strikes. Sixteen years after the so called “War on Terror” began, most humanitarian actors around Mosul behave in line with how Colin Powell (a previous US secretary of state) described […]