My first impressions of Raqqa when I first arrived
was just a scene of utter devastation.
This was a city that
had functioning electricity, running water,
it was very beautiful to look at, and
the whole facade of the city has just been blown apart,
there's rubble across the entire street and it's littered with explosive devices now.
You hear artillery going off
but the thing is that, at the end of the day, I get to go home back to the UK.
The national staff who work in MSF hospitals day in and day out
they're the ones that live in this country and they're the ones that
day in and day out come to work and save people's lives.
They've lived through everything. They've lived through
bombings, sniper attacks,
everything you can really imagine
with minimal resources.
Within our emergency department, when we had mass casualties,
back in London, you'd have specialist trauma doctors, specialist trauma surgeons,
that are dealing with all of this.
We had two general practitioners, we had a dermatologist
and a paediatrician who are dealing with this
and this isn't their speciality, but
they've stepped up to the plate to save people's
lives because there are just not enough doctors.
When we first went into Raqqa the majority of our work was all trauma,
trauma stabilisation.
And the majority of people, as they came back to their homes
were finding that they were rigged with explosives and
a lot of people were getting injured from that.
So we set up a trauma stabilisation post
and we started to treat all these people,
keeping as many people alive as possible
and then getting them up the road to Tal Abyad
where we could do definitive surgical intervention
to keep these people alive and rehabilitate them.
People that come in from blast injuries, it's generally not just one person.
It can be a family sometimes.
It can be a group of people who are trying to clear out
say, for instance, a school, so that kids can go back to school.
And you'll have maybe four or five people coming in.
Half the roads are strewn with rubble, with
possible pieces of explosive devices.
So you'll literally see people coming in the back of pick-up trucks,
in the boots of people carriers,
or even wheelbarrows.
I had one dad carry his child who was just newly born
about half an hour running straight to the MSF facility in the middle of the night
because the child was blue
and was brought to the MSF facility so that
we could try and do everything we could to keep it alive.
This child was born premature.
When it was born, it wasn't really breathing greatly
and by the time it was brought to us it was very blue.
Usually there's maybe a bit of blue in the face but it was literally blue all over.
It wasn't breathing very well
but we managed, with what resources we had,
we managed to give it oxygen,
we had to bag it for a little bit, breathe for the kid for a little while,
and eventually it started breathing for itself.
Ideally, in these situations, we'd also have an incubator
- something that every neonatal unit in the country has
but we obviously don't have those kind of things.
We have saline bags that are sitting in these metal bowls
on top of diesel cookers
that we keep warm so that if anyone gets injured from any blasts
if we don't have any blood left we have these bags of warm fluid
so then they're not getting hypothermic.
So literally we just made a bed of these warm bags of fluid
and made sure it wasn't too hot, and put the kid on top of it to keep it warm
as our kind of mini-incubator.
We managed to stabilise the kid, it was
breathing by itself and it was a nice pink colour
and we managed to eventually get it transferred out of Raqqa
and into another MSF facility up in Kobane
where we have a neonatal intensive care unit where we can properly care for it
I think I spoke to them when I was still in Raqqa,
and they said, 'Yeah, it kept us up for a couple of nights but it's still doing well'.