Hospital short of everything, except Pain by Paul McGeough The Age 12:26pm 11th Apr, 2003   April 10 2003    There's a man who goes up to his roof terrace every time the fighting starts. Often he's in his underwear. He watches with his hands spread nonchalantly on the parapet wall.    In a vegetable patch down by the Tigris River, a family of gardeners always crane their necks to see what is happening as the F-18s, usually in pairs, wheel in from the south.    And right now a Vespa scooter is careering erratically down Abu Nuwas Street - its rider with his face turned to the sky as an Iraqi surface-to-air missile whistles off in pursuit of an American fighter jet.    The jet is so low that I can count the missiles clipped to its wings - five. The Iraqi SAM seems to be catching up; the jet does an evasive belly roll, clears the area, takes a new bead on the downtown high-rise that the pilot and his colleagues are attempting to demolish and fires. It's a direct hit.    Baghdad is gripped by a fatalism about life and death. People can't run, so sometimes they don't even bother to hide as the world's most ferocious firepower is turned on a sprawling city with a defenceless civilian population of 5 million.    The instinctive reaction of parents is to get their children out of the city - some are even making them walk to the country.    But Waela Sabah was stuck in Baladiyat, on the city's far eastern flank, where, neighbours say, she thought her children were out of harm's way.    Their descent deep into hell starts the second the pilot in a low-flying F-18 pulls the trigger, unleashing a missile that rips apart their home and their lives.    Tiny 12-year-old Noor, her long black plait a tangle of blood and dust, is dead. In the next cubicle in the Kindi Hospital trauma ward, her younger brother, Abdel Qader, is dead. And across the way, their mother is dying in a sea of her own blood.    If it is possible to have a nightmare within a nightmare, Kindi Hospital is it. The horror of war in Baghdad is distressing, but it is not possible to walk into this hospital without questioning the very essence of humanity as we think we know it.    Kindi has too much death and too much pain. It doesn't have enough medical staff, drugs and equipment. It's running out of body bags. And clean water is dependent on electricity in a city of day-long blackouts.    Patients facing emergency surgery can have only 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, the same as an Australian doctor might prescribe for muscle pain, and there is a critical shortage of anaesthetics. They have resorted to making their own fracture-fixing frames with lengths of steel and moulding clay.    There is not enough hygiene - the hospital wards and emergency rooms are filthy. And because its laundry has been forced to close by the blackouts, doctors are making do with torn gowns instead of towels and wipes.    Patients keep arriving in a procession of racing ambulances, muddied pick-ups and battered taxis. An army of exhausted, weepy support staff help them on to gurneys, scattering the flies that feed on the blood of the last patient.    Men cry openly, uncontrollably; women wail, clutching each other for support. Anger at the West occasionally becomes violent - guns have been cocked and punches thrown at foreign reporters seen to be intruding on Iraqi grief.    A woman drops to the floor in the waiting area, screaming her 12-year-old son's name: "Feran! Feran! Tell me where he is!" Another of her sons attempts to console her, assuring her he is merely wounded after an air strike on their neighbourhood and that he's going to be fine. But Feran had just been declared dead on arrival at Kindi.    A pick-up races in - lights on, horn blaring. On the back, an old man sobs broken-heartedly. He cradles a small boy who seems lifeless - his eyes peer blankly from pools of his own blood. The rose-coloured stain on his white shirt is getting bigger all the time and his tongue hangs from his mouth in a foamy mess.    There is no time to learn his story. He is wheeled into the hospital, a medical team takes one look at him, decides he needs services they can't provide, and he is wheeled back out to an ambulance that screeches off through the hospital gates to another medical centre.    The pick-up gives chase, with the man on the back still in tears. And nobody has time for the two corpses next to him, which have been locked in an intimate embrace by the movement of the vehicle.    Kindi's 12 operating theatres run around the clock. A haggard and tearful Dr Tarib al-Saadi stands outside the hospital.    "I have done 12 operations today - crushings, fractures and amputations. You see that these Americans are hitting civilians - their homes, their streets, their cars and even those who walk about.    "One of the ambulance drivers says they have struck Yarmuk Hospital, so now we worry about a strike here."    Lips quivering and his cheeks stained by his own tears, he goes on: "Everyone is anxious and angry. Maybe I'm the only calm one here."    He locks on a disconsolate woman in black, slumped against a wall. He makes me look at her beautiful face, into her tragic eyes, and he says: "She was driving in the car with her 23-year-old son. They put a bullet in the head because he failed to stop at an American checkpoint." The woman cuts in: "He was innocent. We were on our way home. Why do the Americans do this? God forgive them!"    Dr Saadi asks: "How can anyone who comes to liberate a country do this - lacerate and destroy our people? Do they really think that somehow after a few days this woman will love them?"    There is little talk of Saddam Hussein here. Hazem Mohammed Jabeel, 37, feels the need to prompt his wounded seven-year-old son, Ayman, to give reporters a V-for-victory sign. And despite the fact that his wounded foot will be keeping him here for some time, Haroot Manouk, a 32-year-old fighter, vows to soldier on: "We'll show them, all of you will see."    Surgeon Mohammed Kamil says there has been a marked change in the nature of Kindi's workload since the arrival of American troops in Baghdad at the weekend.    "We're now getting not just shrapnel wounds but pieces of people," he said. "These are wounds from missiles and rockets. They are amputations. They require more urgent surgery."    The numbers have been rising steadily at Kindi - today it received more than 200 injuries and 35 corpses. Six other hospitals serving the city report similar figures, and now they are having the overflow from Iraq's hard-pressed military hospitals foisted on them.    Nothing prepares a visitor for the scene at the hospital morgue. I've been into several in Iraq now and I think I know what to expect - the bodies are always mangled, frequently burnt beyond recognition, but usually treated with as much dignity as each having its own cold metal tray allows.    But when the refrigeration doors are opened on one of several buildings out the back at Kindi, there is just a pile on the floor - maybe 20 or 25 corpses; it is impossible to tell.    Some of the faces are scorched black. Some have their clothes ripped off, their intestines hanging out. Limbs protrude from the pile and it is impossible to tell who is who.    The traffic to and from the morgue is pitiable. Orderlies wheel the dead in and families bring makeshift coffins to take the dead out. When a group of foreign cameramen moves in to film the scene, the four men charged with moving the bodies react badly, angrily chasing them away.    "Why are you taking photos? For Bush?" one of them yells, waving his arms. "Tell him to go to hell." Visit the related web page
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