Explore National Geographic. “There weren’t enough doctors. It would soon expand into a web of underground shelters and become known to locals as the Cave.

It was very, very painful for me to leave the hospital.”Ballour and her team were finally forced to evacuate the wounded and abandon the Cave on March 18, 2018. “I can still hear him crying out to me, asking me to help him.”In Syria, Ballour says, she felt useful, like she was making a difference. She married an activist from Daraa whom she’d communicated with while she was in Ghouta but never previously met.“They are in front of my eyes,” she says. She is involved in a fund, named Al Amal (Hope), to support female leaders and medical workers in conflict zones. Sometimes I’d crash, I’d break down.”She still has nightmares and every loud sound reminds her of a warplane. Everybody was an emergency case. The effort to share Sơn Đoòng (also known as Hang Sơn Đoòng) with the world has been decades in the making. The Cave (Arabic: الكهف ‎) is a 2019 Syrian-Danish documentary film directed by Feras Fayyad and written by Fayyad and Alisar Hasan.

“When I looked at the children in Idlib I remembered my children and what happened to them. Trained as a pediatrician, Amani Ballour went directly from medical school to treating those wounded in Syria's civil war. I couldn’t look into their eyes when I worked on them.

“There are children I cannot forget, it’s impossible to forget them. What could I do for him?

“I’m a surgeon who has spent his life in operating theaters, but after the bitter experience that we survived, after the inhumanity and suffering that we saw in Ghouta, I can’t stand the sight of blood or being in an operating theater,” he says, “Even though to me surgery is a technique, like a painter working on a portrait. Wards including pediatrics and internal medicine were added. “I couldn't hear anything or see anything.



“He was about eleven years old.”Her first job, as a volunteer without pay, was treating the wounded in a field hospital set up in a partially constructed building that the regime had slated to become a hospital.
“My conscience is clear.



From Oscar-nominated filmmaker Feras Fayyad, THE CAVE tells the story of a hidden underground hospital in Syria and the unprecedented female-led team who risk their lives to provide medical care to the besieged local population.

Toward the end of 2015, Ballour decided to stand for the position. Instead, she plans to shift to radiology, because she says, “I can't psychologically see patients any more, especially children.” It’s a sentiment that Namour understands. Ballour marched in a demonstration but didn’t tell her family, certain that her parents “would have been a million percent against it [because] they were very afraid something would happen to me.” At another protest, she captured brief snippets of video but was too scared to disseminate them. You need to install or update your flash player.

“It was very special to me.”Ballour and several of her family members and colleagues including Namour initially fled to nearby Zamalka, a suburb of Damascus, but there was shelling there too.
I was so shocked I couldn’t do my job. 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. A companion piece to his earlier film Last Men in Aleppo, the film profiles Amani Ballour, a female doctor in Ghouta who is operating a makeshift hospital nicknamed "the Cave" during the Syrian Civil War. It was a sound that Albrechtsen sourced from Russian colleagues. ‘The Cave’ Review: Do No Harm, for as Long as Possible Feras Fayyad’s new documentary takes viewers into a subterranean Syrian hospital, as warplanes rumble …