BAGHDAD, April 11: Hospitals were in “catastrophic” condition, aid workers said on Friday, with the remaining few doctors carrying arms due to looting and near anarchy in Baghdad in the power vacuum left by President Saddam Hussein’s ouster.
With assault-rifles on their shoulders, doctors in white overshirts were treating patients at the emergency room of the Saddam Hospital for Children (SHC) in the Mansur central neighborhood.
The bands of looters who have fanned the streets of Baghdad to take anything they could lay their hands on have even broken into hospitals. They stole medicines, stethoscopes, towels, air conditioners, and even incubators.
Ambulances are seen roaming the streets, driven by excited youths puffing on cigarettes.
At the SHC emergency room, there is a shortage of doctors who did not flee due to the massive US strikes on the capital since March 20 and the widespread banditry that erupted with the entry of US forces into Baghdad on Wednesday.
Children were being buried in the backyard of the hospital due to the lack of space, electricity and security in the morgue.
“Out of the 32 hospitals in Baghdad, only three are currently operating, and not in a normal manner,” Pascal Jansen, a coordinator from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said.
“The hospitals are suffering severe shortages of water, power and fuel. They do not have doctors or staff. They can only last in this situation for the next three or four days,” he said.
It was the first time in several days that the ICRC had inspected a hospital here due to the lack of security.
The ICRC suspended operations after one of its staff members, Canadian logistics expert Vatche Arslanian, was killed in crossfire in the east of the Iraqi capital on Tuesday.
In Geneva, ICRC spokeswoman Antonella Notari said the remaining team of five foreign workers and several dozen Iraqi staff was trying to visit Baghdad hospitals on Thursday to restore electricity and clean water and provide medical supplies.
At Saddam Medical City, the capital’s largest medical center, only 10 percent of the doctors and staff were still working.
“In the last 10 days, I probably only slept 10 hours,” said an eye surgeon.
“All the patients have been sent home because we cannot care for them anymore. We are only receiving those who are being wounded by the gunshots, mostly related to looting,” he said.
Outside the hospital, a gruesome smell hung in the air as people waited at the front door with bleeding wounds. Two bodies lay on the sidewalk for hours, near a refrigerated truck with corpses seen from the opened doors.
“The situation of the hospitals in Baghdad is chaotic and catastrophic,” ICRC medical coordinator Peter Tarabula told AFP during a visit to Al-Kindi hospital, one of the biggest medical centers in the capital.
The hospital in the east of the city has been ransacked and all staff have fled after asking patients to return home. Only the emergency room was trying to provide first aid with two volunteer doctors who however do not carry out operations.
More than 25 people were admitted to the hospital on Friday after suffering gunshot wounds in clashes during looting in the Iraqi capita.
The hospital has been taken over by Sheikh Abbas al-Zubaidi who said the authority in Najaf entrusted him to prevent lootings. —AFP
