Honorable Mention / 2012 / Press / War

Syria's Secret Clinics

In Syria's bloody uprising, which began in March, public hospitals are being raided by the security forces who are then killing injured protesters. Doctors and medical staff who help the injured, risk torture and imprisonment.
An underground safety net has been created to smuggle patients into "secret hospitals". These are ill-equipped private homes, tents or remote buildings set up as field clinics. To avoid the risk of military attacks they are frequently set up and dismantled in a few days or often in hours. Some patients, despite being in critical condition, are carried over the border to hospitals in Turkey.

Natasha Fillion is a Canadian photojournalist. She discovered photojournalism while backpacking around the world in her late teens and early 20's. She studied Photojournalism at Loyalist Collage in Canada and started her career freelancing for daily newspapers in Montreal. She was based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for a year after the 2010 earthquake. Most recently she has focused her lens on the Syrian revolution, she crossed into the country illegally from Turkey and for two weeks covered the uprising with the opposition army and local activists.