http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14574337/
Iraqi hospitals are war’s new ‘killing fields’
Medical sites targeted by Shiite militiamen
By Amit R. Paley
Updated: 8:50 a.m. ET Aug. 30, 2006
BAGHDAD - In a city with few real refuges from sectarian violence -- not
government offices, not military bases, not even mosques -- one place
always emerged as a safe haven: hospitals.
So Mounthir Abbas Saud, whose right arm and jaw were ripped off when a
car bomb exploded six months ago, must have thought the worst was over
when he arrived at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital, a major medical center here.
Instead, it had just begun. A few days into his recovery at the
facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni
mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a
breathing tube out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets,
family members said.
Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days,
not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded
Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq's
Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients,
families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even
harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere.
Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency
rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad
and into clinics in safer provinces.
In most cases, family members and hospital workers said, the motive for
the abductions appeared to be nothing more than religious affiliation.
Because public hospitals here are controlled by Shiites, the killings
have raised questions about whether hospital staff have allowed Shiite
death squads into their facilities to slaughter Sunni Arabs.
‘Prefer now to die’
"We would prefer now to die instead of going to the hospitals," said Abu
Nasr, 25, a Sunni cousin of Saud and former security guard from
al-Madaan, a Baghdad suburb. "I will never go back to one. Never. The
hospitals have become killing fields."
Three Health Ministry officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity for
fear of being killed for discussing such topics publicly, confirmed that
Shiite militias have targeted Sunnis inside hospitals. Adel Muhsin
Abdullah, the ministry's inspector general, said his investigations into
complaints of hospital abductions have yielded no conclusive evidence.
"But I don't deny that it may have happened," he said.
According to patients and families of victims, the primary group
kidnapping Sunnis from hospitals is the Mahdi Army, a militia controlled
by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that has infiltrated the
Iraqi security forces and several government ministries. The minister of
health, Ali al-Shimari, is a member of Sadr's political movement. In
Baghdad today, it is often impossible to tell whether someone is a
government official, a militia member or, as is often the case, both.
"When their uniforms are off, they are Sadr people," said Abu Mahdi,
another of Saud's cousins. "When their uniforms are on, they are
Ministry of Interior or Ministry of Health people."
Abdullah said only a small percentage of the Health Ministry's 30,000
employees are known members of the Mahdi Army. But he acknowledged that
militia membership among personnel in the agency's 15,000-member
security force might be much higher.
"I have no way of knowing if they are related to Sadr or not," Abdullah
said. "If there is no criminal record, we hire them."
Sunnis' increasing suspicion of hospital workers is perhaps the most
vivid illustration of their widespread distrust of the Shiite-led
government. Suhaib al-Obeidi, 35, a supermarket owner from the heavily
Sunni district of Adamiyah, said he lost his final ounce of confidence
in the government during a brush with death in a hospital two weeks ago.
On a quiet weekday morning, as Obeidi unloaded canned chicken and Pepsi
from a van and into his store, a gunfight broke out on the street and a
spray of bullets struck him, he said -- first in his right shoulder,
then in his back. As he tried to crawl away, another bored into his leg.
A friend shoved his bleeding body into a taxi and took him to nearby
al-Nuuman Hospital.
But when they arrived, a friendly doctor warned them that the Mahdi Army
was coming to arrest Sunnis, Obeidi said. So they sneaked out to another
hospital, Medical City in the Bab al -Muadam district, to get treatment.
‘Tell me where you live!’
"Tell me where you live!" a nurse at Medical City snapped at the
arriving patients, Obeidi recalled, as the staff moved residents of
mainly Sunni areas into a separate room.
A few moments later, he saw Mahdi Army troops handcuff five Sunni men
who were donating blood -- including the friend who had brought him to
the hospital -- and haul them out of the hospital, Obeidi said. A Sunni
doctor ran up to him and said he would be killed unless he fled
immediately.
Wearing only underwear and some bandages the doctor had applied to his
wounds, Obeidi escaped in a taxi to the home of his in-laws in the
upscale Mansour district. He lay in bed for an hour as he waited for the
Sunni doctor to follow him from the hospital. The bed was drenched in so
much blood that his family later dumped it in the trash.
"You were only a few minutes away from death," the doctor said when he
arrived at the home an hour later. The doctor, one of the few Sunnis at
Medical City, asked that his name not be used because he felt it would
further endanger his life.
Inside an illegal clinic in a dingy apartment building, the doctor
operated on Obeidi for seven hours. But Obeidi hasn't been able to get
any follow-up treatment; he has vowed never to set foot in a hospital
again, even if he is mortally wounded or deathly ill.
"I'd rather go to the pharmacy and take random simple medicine," he
said.
The reluctance of Sunnis to enter hospitals is making it increasingly
difficult to assess the number of casualties caused by sectarian
violence. During a recent attack on Shiite pilgrims, a top Sunni
political leader accused the Shiite-led government of ignoring large
numbers of Sunnis who he said were also killed and wounded in the clash,
though he was unable to offer even a rough estimate of the Sunni
casualties.
"The situation is so bad that people are just treated inside their homes
after being attacked by the Shia militias," said the official, Alaa
Makki, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, part of the largest Sunni
bloc in parliament. "The miserable fact is that most of the hospitals
are controlled by these militias."
Qasim Yahya, a spokesman for the health minister, said he had never
heard accusations that Sunnis have been taken from hospitals by Shiite
militias or Iraqi security forces.
‘We treat all victims’
"We are the Health Ministry for all of Iraq. Not for Sunnis, not for
Shiites. For everyone," Yahya said. "If a car bomb explosion takes
place, do we ask who is Sunni or Shiite? No. We treat all victims,
regardless of who they are or what sect they are."
Sahib al-Amiri, a leader in the Sadr movement, said: "These things that
are being said in the Baghdad street are untrue. The Mahdi Army's only
role is to fight the Sunni insurgents and protect the Shiites."
But the relatives of Sunni hospital patients tell a different story. In
the case of Mounthir Abbas Saud, a trip to a hospital set off a chain of
events that sparked a still-ongoing six-month-old drama in which two of
his cousins are dead and two more are missing.
It started with cigarettes. As Saud strolled down a street in the
Karrada district on Feb. 27 to buy a pack, a powerful car bomb wrenched
his right arm off his body, ripped off much of his face and sprayed
shrapnel into his lower intestines.
His prognosis was grim. Saud could breathe only with a tube that needed
to be cleaned several times an hour. His family flocked to Ibn al-Nafis
to watch over him.
Two weeks later, as Saud's cousin Hazim Aboud Saud returned to the
hospital after a trip to buy medication for his wounded relative, he saw
the facility surrounded by militiamen carrying machine guns, the family
said. He watched as the gunmen removed the still severely wounded cousin
from the building -- just dragging him on the ground instead of using a
stretcher, his family said. The militia members loaded Saud, his brother
Khodair and a cousin, Adil Aboud Saud, into an ambulance and drove away.
"They were screaming, 'We haven't done anything wrong! Why are you doing
this?' " said Abu Nasr. "They begged the men to at least take care of my
wounded cousin properly."
A few days later, Mounthir's bullet-riddled body was discovered in Sadr
City, a Shiite slum controlled by the Mahdi Army. His mouth was stuffed
with dirt.
When militiamen discovered that one of the cousins, Hazim Saud, a
32-year-old taxi driver, had witnessed the abductions, they quickly
kidnapped him, his family said. His body was found March 27 with his
hands -- broken and blue from apparent beatings -- bound behind his back
and a plastic bag over his head. The death certificate said he had been
suffocated.
But the family held out hope that the two men seized with Mounthir Saud
-- Khodair and Adil Saud -- were still alive. When another cousin,
Haithem Ali Abbas, a judge in Baghdad, received a call from the
Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry that they had been located, he
hurried to the ministry's headquarters to pick them up. He was shot to
death by unknown gunmen shortly after he arrived.
The suffering extends even to those who now wouldn't dare enter a
hospital. Abu Youssef, a cousin of Mounthir Saud who has a pea-size
tumor in his right foot, now walks with a limp and acute pain because he
is petrified to see a doctor. Another relative with a condition that
causes overproduction of blood cells won't go for his normal treatments
anymore.
‘All we want is security and safety’
On a recent weekday morning, Abu Nasr sat in a quiet restaurant in
central Baghdad and pulled out a crumpled envelope filled with death
certificates and photographs of his recently killed relatives. Sighing
heavily and staring frequently at the dirty ground, he said he prayed
that someone would rescue the country from the sectarian violence that
is ravaging it.
"We don't care whether the government is Shiite, Sunni, American or
Iranian. All we want is security and safety," he said. "But no one in
the government represents that now."
When asked whether Iraq has already descended into civil war, he said:
"Of course. All the Shiites want to do is kill all the Sunnis."
"What is going to happen to us?" he said as he clutched a tiny photo of
his dead cousin Mounthir. "What is going to happen to this country?"
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post
staff in Iraq contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
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