This was in the new york times some days ago...
Each time emergency workers return to the Mansour district ambulance station after a run, they jot notes in a dog-eared logbook that doubles as a grim diary of life here in the capital.
Sept. 10, for example: bombing with two dead.
Or Sept. 29: woman shot in the abdomen.
Oct. 10: man with shrapnel wounds.
Ambulance workers have among the clearest views of Baghdad's descent into chaos. As the city has disintegrated around them, they have been left to pick up the pieces. They are often overwhelmed, and have increasingly become targets themselves.
''These three years have been equal to 16 years as a paramedic,'' said Ali Jasim, 38, before he set off on a convoy carrying medicine and other supplies to Balad, a town north of the capital that was the site of horrific sectarian bloodletting.
Before the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003, so-called hot calls, for bombings or shootings, were virtually nonexistent for Baghdad's emergency workers. Now most of Baghdad's ambulance calls are hot. A relatively calm 24-hour shift might mean having to wash the blood from their clothes only once, the workers say.
In this war-ravaged city of five million people, only about 90 ambulances and crews are typically available on any given day for emergency calls, said Dr. Hashim Jabbar Muhammad, chief of the Health Ministry's emergency directorate. He said international standards recommended several times that number for a city this size.
The city's emergency dispatch system, the Iraqi equivalent of 911, amounts to a dingy room with 10 phone lines; on a recent visit, three of them were broken. Calls come in at a rate of about one every 10 minutes, although residents often complain that the lines are busy.
Each call requires a cumbersome process of calling back to make sure the call is legitimate.
The ambulance corps here and elsewhere in Iraq feel each spike in violence. When sectarian assassinations surged after the attack on a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, in February, the Baghdad ambulance drivers who pick up dead bodies were swamped.
The capital's maddening traffic, and the fact that most residents ignore sirens, compound the challenges. Ambulance crews are also treated with suspicion by American troops because militants have been known to use ambulances to transport weapons or bombs. The Americans frequently pull over ambulances in the middle of runs to search them.
Emergency workers earn salaries that are often barely enough to live on, as little as $80 a month for new paramedics. Drivers are also held responsible for any damage they incur on their vehicles.
''I wish I could quit,'' said Muhammad Nerous, 26, who has been a paramedic for six years and works at a station in the Bab Sharji neighborhood. ''Every day when I come to work, I pray there will be no explosions because I am fed up with these scenes.''
As they rush to bombings now, a secondary blast is often aimed at them. Eleven emergency workers were killed in 2006. Previously, six others had been killed since early 2004, when the department started keeping track.
More than 10 percent of Baghdad's ambulance drivers have resigned in the last three months alone as violence has escalated, said Dr. Muhammad of the Health Ministry.
On a typical call last month, a crew from the center in Mansour, a troubled western Baghdad neighborhood, transported a woman who had just gone into labor to the hospital. But after dropping her off, a firefight broke out nearby, and the crew was stuck in the cross-fire.
Upon their return, the workers scrawled a new notation in the logbook: ''We could have been killed for this assignment. But God's protection was available.''
It was apparently unavailable several months ago when gunmen killed an ambulance driver from Mansour en route to the dangerous southern neighborhood of Dora. As the ambulance was stopped in traffic, two men appeared and sprayed the vehicle with bullets. The driver, Akram Muhammad Sahih, 34, a married father of two, was killed.
''I pretended I was dead,'' said Ali Jabbar Hatin, 34, who was sitting next to Mr. Sahih in the ambulance. He escaped injury but the other paramedic in the vehicle was wounded.
Arkan Ali Hussein, 40, a veteran paramedic who works out of the Mansour center, has an unusual system for keeping in touch with his worried wife throughout his 24-hour shift. She calls his cellphone and hangs up, avoiding a charge. When he calls back and then hangs up, she knows he is alive, he said. The pair exchange missed calls at least a dozen times a day.
But he is reluctant to share with her the horror he sees. Two months ago, a man wearing a suicide belt detonated himself at an army recruiting center in western Baghdad. Mr. Hussein was among the first to arrive.
''There were pieces of flesh everywhere,'' he said. ''People were yelling and screaming.''
The first man he treated was badly burned, riddled with shrapnel. He shoved a tube into the man's mouth to establish an airway, then rushed him to the hospital.
When he returned, he spotted a severed leg lying on the ground but could not find the body it belonged to, so he left it, moving on to another victim. The gruesome injuries that he sees nowadays, he said, are much worse than anything he witnessed as a medic in the military during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
''Back then, there was a bullet in the body or a blast from a mine.'' he said, ''Now we're finding flesh everywhere, heads, legs and hands.''
Most of the paramedics have only minimal training. As a result, Dr. Muhammad said, their main strategy, rather than treating patients in the field, is to ''scoop and run.''
Often, however, there is little they can do. Bilal Mehdi, 26; his brother, Hilmi, 23; and their father, Mehdi Hussain Lazim, 54, are part of a small contingent of emergency workers who only pick up the dead.
Earlier this year, they helped deliver 800 bodies to the morgue in one month from a single sewage treatment station in the mixed eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Rustamiya. Bilal Mehdi said he took 300 bodies himself. Militia members had been dumping bodies into the sewers nearby, and they would wind up at the station. Mr. Mehdi had to clamber down by rope to retrieve the putrid remains.
More recently, he said, he delivered a dozen bodies stacked in his ambulance in one trip from Mahmudiya, south of the capital; some of them decapitated, some without legs. He drove back with his head out the window, because the smell was so overpowering.
As the body count in Baghdad continues to mount, Mr. Mehdi says he wishes he could leave his job. But without any other job prospects, he is stuck for now. He knows it is only a matter of time until his next call.
0 comments:
Post a Comment