- It was a scene from the Crimean War; a hospital of screaming
wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff; it stuck
to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency
room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets.
-
- The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan
Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein's regime
yesterday sometimes still clinging to severed limbs are the dark side of
victory and defeat; final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours,
that war is about the total failure of the human spirit. As I wandered
amid the beds and the groaning men and women lying on them Dante's visit
to the circles of hell should have included these visions the same old
questions recurred. Was this for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons
of mass destruction?
-
- In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man
on a soaked hospital trolley. He had a head wound which was almost indescribable.
From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood
on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the
other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that
the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to
a rope weighed down with concrete blocks.
-
- Her name was Rawa Sabri. And as I walked through this
place of horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris river
outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death which they had
suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach
the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the
medical centre. Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as
doctors pushed shrieking children away from the windows.
-
- Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old
Ottoman Empire. But her equivalent is Dr Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director
and chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for
six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls
a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of use you
cannot carry patients in your arms to the 16th floor when they are coughing
blood.
-
- Dr Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe
how difficult it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when
they have been wounded in the thorax, explaining that after four operations
to extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired
to think, let alone in English. As I leave him, he tells me that he does
not know where his family is.
-
- "Our house was hit and my neighbours sent a message
to tell me they sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two
little girls, they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because
their father had to work night and day at the hospital and they mustn't
cry because I have to work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they
are." Then Dr Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could
not say goodbye.
-
- There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound
to the neck. It seemed the doctors could not staunch his blood and he was
dribbling his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and sharp
had cut into his stomach and six inches of bandages could not stop the
blood from pumping out of him. His brother stood beside him and raised
his hand to me and asked: "Why? Why?"
-
- A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket.
It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I
didn't have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl.
-
- There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and
the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful,
and it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children
outside the wards. Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they
had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms
and chests and legs; naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the
doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless
arms held upwards, each beseeching a non-existing saviour to rescue him
from his pain.
-
- "No! No! No!" another young man screamed as
doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied
like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and
well fed but now he was a child again and he cried: "Umma, Umma [Mummy,
mummy]".
-
- I left this awful hospital to find the American shells
falling in the river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a
small patch of grass near the hospital's administration building and "God
damn it," I said under my breath an armoured vehicle with a gun mounted
on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few metres inside
the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to conceal it. And
I couldn't help noticing the name of the hospital. Adnan Khairallah had
been President Saddam's minister of defence, a man who allegedly fell out
with his leader and died in a helicopter crash whose cause was never explained.
-
- Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its
victims had to lie in a building named in honour of a murdered man.
-
- http://www.robert-fisk.com
- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395680
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