Baghdad
Pays The Postwar Price:
242 Die In Three Weeks
By Phil Reeves
in Baghdad
Independent
16 May 2003
Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: 242 people
have died in Baghdad in just over three weeks, almost all from bullet
wounds. It is an epidemic, and it is getting worse.
But the late-night scenes
in a city hospital tell the real story of the postwar price that the
Iraqi capital is paying for the occupying forces' failure to live up
to their responsibility to make the streets safe.
At 3.20am yesterday, Haider
Khassem's friends stuffed him half-dead into the back seat of a car.
Doctors at al-Kindi hospital's casualty department had done all they
could to treat the four bullet wounds in his chest with which he had
been brought to them 90 minutes earlier, a hefty young man thrashing
in agony and spouting blood like a clubbed seal. They concluded he needed
urgent treatment by specialists at a cardiothoracic hospital 20 minutes
away. The driver of al-Kindi's only remaining ambulance the other
three have been stolen or looted had disappeared. So the dangerously
ill Mr Khassem was bundled into a clapped-out, rust-bitten orange Moskavich
408. A friend held his intravenous drip out of the back window. In the
front seat sat Salah Fayek, his head wrapped in a turban of bandages
to staunch an injury inflicted in the same attack.
Thus, the maimed and wounded
set off into the benighted streets of Baghdad, a city under curfew and
echoing with sporadic gunfire, to try to save a life.
Fifty minutes earlier
the same. A third victim, Mohammed Tahab, was squeezed into the back
of a white Oldsmobile Cutlass, his eyes swollen like plums from a bullet
through the brain, his green Iraqi Olympic tracksuit covered with large
blots of blood. "I just don't think he'll make it," said Dr
Rebar Nouri, al-Kindi's resident duty doctor, as he watched the vehicle
pull away past American soldiers guarding the hospital gate again
with an arm out of the car window holding aloft an IV drip.
Amazingly, both men were
still alive yesterday afternoon. Doctors said Mr Tahab was brain-damaged
but clinging to life, although only just. Mr Khassem was stable.
The exact circumstances of
their shooting was impossible to clarify their relatives alleged
it was American soldiers, but this was not confirmed yet such
scenes have become the norm here.
Dr Fa'ak Amin Bakr, director
of the city mortuary, says 242 people have died in the past 25 days,
of whom more than nine out of 10 had been shot. He says that before
the invasion Baghdad had an average of one death a day caused by gunshot
wounds.
Battles between looters and
score-settling from the Saddam years have taken hold, fuelled by a security
vacuum that owes much to a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the American
Defence Secretary, to invade and occupy Iraq with minimum troop numbers
two divisions short, say well- informed sources within the Allies'
reconstruction team.
They are the by-product,
too, of the failure of the Allies to coax the Baghdad police to return
to work in sufficient numbers. Most of the Iraqi officers who have returned
have yet to come out of their police stations.
And homicide figures are
going up. The 124 who died from bullet wounds in the past 10 days is
a rise of 60 per cent on the previous 10-day period.
At al-Kindi hospital, 13
people were brought inwith bullet injuries in the 24 hours to yesterday
morning. Their combined stories spoke much about present-day Baghdad:
there was an 18-year-old girl shot by her brother, who had apparently
been given a weapon by his arms-dealing father. She died in the hospital.
A six-year-old boy who according to a doctor who treated him
was hit by a bullet while standing in front of his house, arrived
at hospital with a "chest full of blood". There was Nadim
Zeidan, shot in the leg in what a relative told a doctor was a revenge
attack against his Baathist father in which his brother was killed.
Hamid Turki, 28, came in after a bullet fired in a tribal dispute shattered
his hip bone. And so the list continued.
This is the mess that Washington
has deployed Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a protégé
of Henry Kissinger, to sort out. Unlike Jay Garner, the man he replaces
as Iraq's chief administrator, he has been assigned full authority over
the Allied administration in Iraq.
At his first press conference
in Baghdad yesterday, Mr Bremer sounded a bullish note, saying 300 suspected
criminals had been thrown into Iraq's reopened jails this week
92 on Wednesday alone. The "serious law and order problem"
in the capital was a top priority, he said. He noted that 100,000 inmates
were released from Iraqi prisons in October by Saddam Hussein. "It's
time those people are put back in jail," he said.
This peculiar endorsement
of Saddam's judicial system will not endear Mr Bremer to human and civil
rights activists. Less likely to object are the desperate doctors of
Baghdad who want something to be done before hundreds more end up in
the mortuary.