https://nyti.ms/2Lh7Ral 
It's worth pointing out that the top people in HTS favor the destruction of hospitals more than the regime does. Why did HTS/ Jebhat establish their first major fighting base/ HQ in eastern Aleppo’s largest hospital complex? Could they not have used, like,

the bodega down the street?When I was a prisoner in the Aleppo Eye Hospital basement, the fighters spent their free time ripping their plumbing from the walls. They axed up the wooden window frames and doors, piled these into heaps,

then burned the heaps. One of the commanders in this hospital occasionally proposed a (probably fake) deal to a cell mate: the cell mate could go free on the condition that he give information (which he pretended he had) leading to the arrest of an

MSF doctor in Azaz. Allegedly, the top Jebhat al Nusra men thought the doctor was a spy. But they did they really? Hospitals provide a community, especially a war-torn one, with a center. The public loves and trusts doctors. But this is intolerable to the top rebel

commanders. The community is supposed to love and trust God. When you are in trouble, you’re meant to fling yourself at the feet of the big sheikhs in Jebhat al Nusra. My first interrogator in Aleppo was the then international spokesman for al Qaeda, Mohammed Adnani.

He tortured me as he asked his questions. After a few days of this, I was covered in blood. One afternoon, he came to the room in which I was being held, knelt down to the spot on the floor where I was sitting, then whispered into my ear. “I don’t care if you are a journalist.

Maybe you’re a doctor. Who knows?” The important thing, for him, was that I had no business coming to his glorious caliphate-to-be. I understood from this remark—and from many similar ones—that he felt journalists and doctors belonged to a single species of interloper.

He wanted to do away w/ all the specimens bc in his dream of Islam, the Koran, working through him, was going to reign over all aspects of reality. Like his friends in HTS, he was keen to eliminate the competition.

With regards to medicine, Adnani and his friends who went on to lead HTS had a public relations problem. Even when they spoke before their nearest and dearest, they could not very well say, “We hate hospitals and doctors. We mean to destroy them all. We’d rather you worship us.”

They could, however, encourage the fighters to dismantle the hospitals. They could and can turn the basements into arsenals and killing factories. If they have one room for curing the people of whom they approve and 15 rooms for killing people of whom they disapprove

isn’t this “hospital” an evil place? During my six months as a prisoner in the Aleppo Eye Hospital, I came to feel that if I truly hoped for the best for the civilian population of this city, I could not also hope that the hospital in which I was living would not be bombed away.

So I began to hope for this. I longed for it, tbh. The reason this New York Times report is silly is that the reporters haven’t the faintest notion of what goes on inside the hospitals they write about, whereas the Syrian government really does.

The result: the reporters have a slew of facts and no idea what the facts mean. #Pulitzer2020 @malachybrowne @ddknyt @hrw @RaniaKhalek @KreaseChan @rcallimachi