Dr. Abdullah Sutuf stood facing the operating table not knowing what to do. In a makeshift field hospital in northern Syria, the general surgeon was confronted with the critically injured body of a five-year old boy whose stomach, minutes earlier, had been lacerated by shrapnel from a Russian airstrike. The sedative he had injected into the boy’s arm was wearing off, the small body writhing in agony. Sutuf tried to plug the boy’s bleeding vessels with his fingers in the open wounds, but he couldn’t find them: The electricity had gone out again.
