Meet Dr. Abo Saad, the surgeon you watched in For Sama as he was saving a pregnant woman and her infant

I’m Dr. Abo Saad. I have been a general surgeon since 1993 and I have now been living in both Idlib and Aleppo’s countryside since we were forcibly displaced from Aleppo. This is my story over the course of ten years of the revolution. 

Since day one of the revolution, I provided free urgent medical attention to the wounded, both in my personal clinic and private hospitals. Once an operation finished, we used to transfer the patients to private apartments to protect them from the regime forces. 

As the situation developed and Eastern Aleppo got out of the regime’s control, I kept working for free in my personal clinic and East Aleppo’s public hospital alongside Dr. Abdulsalam Al-daeef and Dr. Mahmoud Al-Hariri, who were both doing amazing work at the time. The regime used to mercilessly bomb civilian areas all the time. We did dozens of operations with little to no capacity. Resources and equipment were low - we had to use whatever we could find in the hospital to do the procedures as safely as possible. 

I remember that in the first Ramadan of the revolution, I was the only surgeon doctor in the hospital and we received more than 40 injuries in one wave. We worked painfully hard, for too long. It almost felt like dying. One day, I was doing an open abdominal operation for a young man and during the operation, someone came to us terrified, saying. “Doctor, wrap up quickly! The regime forces will be in the hospital in an hour”. It was a very difficult situation. I turned to my surgical assistant and the anesthetic technician and said, “Will you continue this operation with me?” They said, “We’re with you no matter what”. We continued the operation and the young man survived. We had been lucky that time - that day, the regime forces fell back and were unable to enter Eastern Aleppo. 

As the regime’s attack on civilians escalated, people were in even more need of medical attention. I founded the first clinic in eastern Aleppo along with a dentist, internal doctor and gynecologist to provide medical care for people, and later we added a team for vaccinating children. I used to frequently go to Al-Quds hospital, it was a small clinic at that time, but then it was expanded into a hospital by Dr. Hamzah and Dr. Abdulsalam Al-Daeef. It was then that I transferred there to open the surgery department and start working at Al-Quds hospital.

I still remember a man in his sixties who had been shot in the chest by a sniper from the regime’s forces. He was barely able to walk when he arrived at the hospital. That morning, the generator was broken and I did a chest operation for him without any light, except small lighters and flashes! Fortunately, the man was discharged to return home once he was doing better. 

What made the people feel even more desperate, were all the tortured and killed detainees that the regime sent to us by the river. A lot of the people who had worked on pulling the bodies from the river came to me with nervous breakdowns. 

I used to do normal routine surgeries in Al-Quds hospital but when the shelling got more intense and the regime used barrel bombs on civilians we had massacre after massacre. There was a river of blood belonging to children, women, and the elderly. 

I always felt like the staff at Al-Quds hospital were like my children and my siblings - I was the one who fixed the disputes among staff members or between the staff and management. 

When the hospitals in the countryside needed a surgeon, I was always there, because saving lives in Aleppo or anywhere else is both my professional and moral responsibility. We used to go to the countryside through a road named “Alcastelo,” which means, ‘The road of death’. I remember one day I went with Dr. Hamza and Waad to support one hospital with their surgeries. We went through that road in the middle of the night - bombs were landing everywhere around us, and we were unable to turn on the car’s lights fearing the regime’s warplanes. We reached our destination and once I completed the surgeries, we returned to Aleppo the next day.  

Our staff did not only operate inside the hospital, they also used to respond to the areas that were hit and pull people from under the rubble. Al-Quds hospital was targeted more than once and we almost died on top of each other in the corners of the hospital. The hospital was targeted horrifically, the massacre of Al-Quds. Nurses, doctors, and staffers were martyred. One neighborhood was targeted heavily and after a few moments, a child named “Sahad” got to the hospital with a critical injury. We did an urgent operation and she survived, but she lost her mother and brother.

After the regime intensified its shelling on the area even more, I founded a hospital in a garage along the road in Aleppo’s southern countryside. I did some surgeries there, but after a couple of months the hospital was targeted, so we evacuated it. 

Aleppo was then besieged, and I hadn’t seen my family for six months. I spoke to them through the internet, I sent pictures of chocolate to my younger son - I sent roses to my wife and children. 

As she was on the road towards Al-Quds hospital to give birth, Maisaa, a woman in her 9th month of pregnancy, was hit by warplanes and injured in her abdomen, head, and limbs. I did an emergency operation to save her and her child, and the results were great. Not too long ago, a woman came to me at Al-Quds hospital in Idlib, with a five-year old child. It was Maisaa with her child. She was pregnant again and asking for advice that has nothing to do with the previous surgery, thank god. 

After we’d been displaced from Aleppo, I went to support the surgery department in Aleppo’s western countryside hospital. We were hit by the Russian and regime warplanes and the whole hospital collapsed over us, there were three injuries and one martyr, and I only got some minor burns. 

I helped the NGO Syria Relief and Development to create a hospital in a village in Idlib. Staff from Al-Quds hospital joined that hospital and started working until a separate place was provided for Al-Quds hospital to start again. After a few months, Al-Quds hospital was standing again in Al-Dana, Idlib and its staff transferred there. 

My only concern was always to look after Al-Quds hospital’s patients, and to serve the staff, help them, defend them, and make things better for them.