Syria’s brutal civil war has cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians—men, women and children. It would have cost even more were it not for the life-saving efforts of Dr. Amani Ballour, the…
Dr. Amani, who trained as a pediatrician, ran a subterranean hospital in Eastern Ghouta, an area outside Damascus that came under relentless attack from Syrian government forces and their Russian allies. For her work she was recently awarded the Council of Europe’s Raoul Wallenberg Prize, named for the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II.
“I said no at the beginning,” the doctor recalls. “When Feras suggested this idea, actually it was dangerous for me to accept because the Assad regime and Russia were targeting hospitals…and I was the manager of the hospital and responsible for everything.”Filmmaker and subject struck an agreement that the documentary could go forward so long as it didn’t interfere with Dr. Amani’s primary mission.
“Every day some children died [at the hospital] and I wanted to say to her that, ‘You will survive and you have to think of the future. You can be teacher, you can be doctor,’” Dr. Amani explains. “This is very important to me because no one said that to me when I was child. No one said to me that I have rights. No one said to me that I can be an important person in the future…All the people around me, they said, ‘You can get married and have children and work in the home.
Dr. Amani is living for now in Turkey, where she has refugee status. She hopes to resettle in Canada possibly; the United States is not a possibility because of Trump administration restrictions on immigration from Syria and other Muslim-majority countries.
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