Volunteers protect hospital from looters and thieves

By ANDREW BUNCOMBE

BAGHDAD - The group of young men standing at the gates of Al Kindi hospital in blue surgical gowns were clearly not doctors or medical orderlies.

The giveaway sign was the Kalashnikov automatic weapon that each of them was nursing.

"We are volunteers who are protecting the hospital from looters and thieves," said Hayder Daoud, a 30-year-old engineer with closely cropped hair and several days growth of stubble.

"The British and American forces will not protect us so we have to protect ourselves. None of us work here - we just organised ourselves. Some of us are from the neighbourhood, some are from farther away."

As Baghdad slips deeper into lawlessness the looters of the Iraqi capital are now turning to the city's hospitals. Not content stealing from official buildings or the various government ministries now set alight and clogging the sky with dirty black smoke, looters are now raiding hospitals and making off with everything from incubators to heart monitors.

The situation is such that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday (Friday) that it doubted any hospital in Baghdad was still working because of "anarchy" on the city's streets. Spokeswoman Nada Doumani said an ICRC official in the Iraqi capital had told her that "probably there are no more hospitals functioning because of looting (and) lack of medical personnel".

The ICRC's assessment is incorrect. Several hospitals are still working and some are very busy indeed but it is clear that the situation is grave. Doctors say that they are already stretched because of the number of additional patients created by the US-led war and because of injuries caused by looting or looters.

Around 25 people suffering from gunshot wounds were taken to Al Kindi hospital yesterday morning. Doctors who treated them before transferring them to other hospitals said that most of them were looters who had been shot by shopowners trying to protect their property. On Thursday the hospital in the Fustansiriya district of central Baghdad had itself been targeted by armed looters who had stripped it of much of its contents including beds, electrical fittings and medical equipment.

Mr Daoud and his friends were trying to protect what little was left. A number of other hospitals have also been targeted by the looters. One journalist reported that a young boy, allegedly a looter, was beaten to death in front of him by local residents taking the law into their own hands. There have also been reports that both a children's hospital in the Mansur district and a maternity hospital were hit by looters.

The ICRC said it had visited the city's 650-bed Medical City hospital and discovered that very few people were being treated there. Operating theatres are no longer functioning. There are no more instruments in any case," said Ms Doumani. At the Al Khadasia hospital in the Saddam City district in north-east Baghdad local people - again wearing blue gowns - were also protecting the premises. The hospital was very busy, said one doctor who asked not to be named, even though its only electricity was provided by a generator.

"We have many patients at the moment. Many people have been shot by the Americans at roadblocks. Many people do not know what to do and they approach too fast and they get shot," he told The Independent.

"It's possible that some people here have been injured by looters. Many are from areas far away from here."

The scene had been made particularly chaotic by the arrival of a group of civil affairs officers from the US Marines who were trying to distribute medicine and medical equipment they said they had discovered hoarded at a Baath Party building. Many at the hospital did not want the medicine, claiming they had sufficient supplies donated by local people. Others were happy to take it. Having consulted the local Shi'ia Imam, officials at the hospital said they would accept the supplies.

"There is a lot of politics involved here," said Major David Hallahan, who was trying to distribute the supplies. "I am trying to walk a fine line between cooperation and imposing our will. There are many people who don't like us." Clare Short, the British Secretary of State for International Development, said yesterday that US troops in Baghdad needed to make a "massively bigger effort" to bring law and order to the city with priority given to hospitals.

"There must be a much bigger effort to stop all this looting and violence," she said. "We need a massively bigger effort. It should focus on hospitals."

The innocent victims of war

By KIM SENGUPTA in Baghdad

"Why do you all want to talk to Ali? There are hundreds of children suffering like him, and we are getting more every day," asked Dr Moufak Gabriel, the hospital director, as we arrived to see Ali Ismail Abbas, the injured 12-year-old boy who has become the centre of a British media frenzy.

All around him at the Saddam General, the worst-equipped hospital in Baghdad's mostviolent slum, Saddam City, there was pandemonium. Staff were barricading the gates as dozens of people, some ill, some seemingly healthy, struggled to get in. The danger lay beyond them - groups of men with guns, knives and staves silently watching.

Every other major hospital in Baghdad including Al-Kindi, where Ali was initially treated, had been ransacked by mobs of looters. So he had been transferred here and now he lay on a soiled bed, under a neon light, in a room with broken windows and water on the floor. The pitiful pictures of Ali, his arms reduced to bandaged stumps and his body covered in burns, biting his lip in pain and grief, have been carried by newspapers around the world. He will become one of the enduring images of war. For millions of people around the world, Ali is already the face of this conflict. Perhaps one boy's tragedy is easier to comprehend than the enormity of grief and pain visited on an entire nation.

Yet three weeks of war have certainly left scars on countless other Iraqi children. There are no reliable figures for the numbers killed, orphaned or maimed. Thousands will have been affected by contaminated water as the power supply in cities such as Basra and Baghdad were bombed. The immune systems of these children were already depressed by malnutrition after years of sanctions. Even before the war, experts warned the UN that Iraqi children were already suffering "significant psychological harm" from the fear of bombing and death.

The facts of what happened to Ali are as follows: an American missile smashed into his home in the village of Zafaraniya, 30 miles from Baghdad, as his family slept, just after midnight. He was severely burned and both his arms had to be amputated. His father, Ismail, and mother, Azhar, who was pregnant, were killed. Ali has black curly hair and hazel eyes. His aunt Jamila and a nurse brushed away the flies. "If I had hands, I would shake your hand," he said. "They cut them off after the bomb. I want my hands." We stood there awkwardly. Dr Rahim al-Kinani, the doctor treating him, said he had been told that newspapers in Britain had launched an appeal on his behalf and that he would have artificial arms soon.

How much of this Ali understood is not clear. He wanted new hands, he said, but he definitely did not want to go to Britain. This may be a problem, for a number of tabloids are competing to raise funds for an airlift to have him treated at a London clinic.

Ali cried a little and then, unprompted, began to say what happened that night. "We had all gone to bed and there was this loud noise and smoke. I felt very scared and I was in much pain. I kept shouting for my mother. I did not know at the time what had happened to her. "I do not remember much after that. I was taken to a hospital in Zafaraniya. After that they brought me here and the doctors cut off my arms."

Ali has six sisters, aged from six to 20, and a 10-year-old stepbrother. They are now being looked after by an uncle. His favourite subject at school was, he said, geography. He has suffered third-degree burns over 60 per cent of his body. His chances of survival, said Dr Kinani, were 50-50.

"The main problem we face now is septicaemia. Infection is a real problem and, as you can see," he added, "we are not exactly in the most perfect of conditions."

"If he gets through the next phases, there will, in time, be skin grafts. But that is a very difficult process and I am afraid the boy will face pain for a very long time."

Jamila Abbas used a corner of her chador to wipe the boy's eyes.

"He cries all the time. There is nothing I can really say to console him," she said. "He has heard about these people in England getting him new arms. I do not know whether he understands what it means. But he is really building up his hopes."

Two floors away, in another ward of Saddam General, lay 11-year-old Fouad Abu Haidar. He has lost his left arm, half his face is hidden by bandages and he may yet lose one of his eyes. He received his injuries during another air attack, 10 days ago, near Eskandriya, in the southern suburbs of Baghdad. A 14-year-old cousin, Karim, died when the missile struck their house just after nine o'clock in the evening. Fouad has not had anyone visit him from the Western media, and no promises that he will also benefit from the generosity of the British people. His father, Haidar Hussein, said he was glad to know about the concern of the British people but felt nothing but anger about what had happened.

"No one has told me anything about any money from Britain. But this is a war by Bush and Blair. They did this to my son and other children, women, men. Why didn't the British and American people stop their leaders from doing this? What is the justification in bombing ordinary people?"

"Now the Americans are in Baghdad, and look what is going on here. There is looting and killing and the Americans are also killing Iraqis. What is their justification?"

There are other wards and other young victims. A three-year-old boy with a fractured skull, and Jenan, a girl of nine with her foot blown off who has also had to be transferred from al-Kindi. She said: "It hurts a lot, all the time. I do not think I will be able to walk again. I do not know what is going to happen to me. I feel very, very sad." Her grandmother, sitting beside her, started to cry.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war