BAGHDAD: A long queue of patients waited on Wednesday in the dark corridors of the al-Kindi university clinic in Baghdad.

The worst of the looting, which plagued the city after the fall of Saddam Hussein, is now over. But the hospital still has to manage its meagre medical supplies and hope for electricity for the medical equipment to be reconnected.

“This is the liberation of Iraq,” a doctor complains in a bitter swipe at the US occupiers.

For the patients, not much more can be done but to pray and to wait. The problems are blamed on Saddam’s government or the years of the United Nations embargo.

“Above all, we are short on life-saving drugs. We need oxygen, atropin, adrenalin. This isn’t the first time we’ve done without. We’ve not had them for five, maybe even 10 years,” said Feras al- Obeidi, a doctor treating patients in the 400-bed hospital.

“We also need to receive our salaries again after a break of several months,” he said, adding that only one employee in ten has been paid.

“I know that someone from the US civil administration has come to take stock of the situation, but nothing has happened since,” said another doctor.

Nevertheless, the security situation has clearly improved since US soldiers moved a tank near the entrance of the hospital. All visitors are searched for weapons as armed men still manage to get into the hospital.

“Groups of armed men bring their injured comrades into the hospital or visit them any time they want,” said Russian pathologist Sergei Yargin, who is in Baghdad as an aid worker.

“Sometimes they start fights with each other or threaten the doctors to get special treatment,” he said.

There have been several reports of shootings in hospitals and the doctors are not in favour of hospital workers carrying weapons to defend themselves. Help must come from the occupying troops who have recently stepped up their presence.

Hopes of international aid from abroad supplying better equipment are at a standstill as not enough money has been allocated for the reconstruction of the country’s health system.

Some 120 million dollars (110 million euros) are urgently needed for the next six months but foreign countries have only donated 20 million dollars.

The World Health Organization (WHO) complains that this is very far from the amount needed to jump-start Iraqi healthcare.—dpa