The man had been dumped near the rubbish bins at the back, blood spreading across his chequered shirt. An orderly, who had been burying bloated corpses in a mass grave in the hospital grounds, recited the Muslim last rites. ”Dead, dead, he’s died, what can we do?” and returned to his shovel. But the man was breathing, in slow laborious gurgles, and his flesh was warm.
Forty-eight hours after Baghdad was liberated — as President George Bush would call it — by American forces, the city yesterday was in the throes of chaos. Men with Kalashnikovs dragged drivers from their cars at gunpoint, babies were killed by cluster bombs, and hospitals that had carried on right through the bombing were transformed into visions of hell.
Floors were coated with stale blood, and wards stank of gangrene. The wounded lay on soiled sheets in hospital lobbies, screaming with pain, or begging for tranquillizers. Orderlies in blue surgical gowns shouldered Kalashnikovs to guard against marauders. Ambulance drivers staged counter-raids on looters to reclaim captured medicines and surgical supplies.
Amid such scenes of anarchy, it was not always clear who was responsible: US soldiers, unnerved by a spate of suicide bombings, who continued yesterday to open fire on civilian cars; the pockets of resistance by the die-hard supporters of the regime; the scores of armed Iraqis rampaging through Baghdad; or the unexploded ordnance strewn about the city. But Iraqis had a ready culprit: they blame America for toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein before it was prepared to deliver order to Baghdad.
At Yarmouk hospital, once the city’s main casualty centre, the unclaimed corpses were so badly rotted that volunteers wearing chemical warfare masks buried them in mass graves. Sixteen stinking corpses were heaved into the ground yesterday and 20 on Thursday, after collection from the local mosques.
Some were Arab recruits to Saddam’s cause, from Syria and Lebanon, with no one to mourn them in Iraq. Some belonged to families stranded in those pockets of Baghdad which remained outside the control of the US troops even yesterday. Others were so badly charred and bloodied, the doctors gave up hope of ever knowing who they were.
”I am searching for my brother. He’s dead since four days ago,” said Thair Mohe el-Din, green eyes tired beyond exhaustion as he returned from the morgue of the Saddam children’s hospital.
On Monday the family home in the Beyaa neighbourhood of west Baghdad was bombed by American aircraft, wounding one of Din’s brothers, and killing another outright. He had visited seven hospitals and countless mosques searching for him.
At each makeshift mortuary he had encountered dozens of corpses. None was his brother, and as he continued to search, edging his car warily through the columns of smoke from plundered buildings and the armed mobs who have taken over the streets, grief was making way for a powerful hatred.
”It’s my country, and I hate Saddam,” he said. ”But why are they allowing robbing, why are they allowing people to set fire to buildings? Saddam was right to put those kinds of people in prison.
”I don’t like Saddam, I hate him; but when I see American soldiers I want to spit on them.”
At Yarmouk hospital there was no time for anger yesterday – only the sad, sickening work of burying the dead. Rifle fire crackled, and the volunteer burial committees stolidly dug on. Then came the boom from an American tank shell, and the hospital guards — neighbours drafted into service with their Kalashnikovs — fled into the grounds. A young man, naked to the waist, ran in screaming, waving his bloodied hands in the air. A sedan with two flat tyres pulled up, with an entire wounded family, and the corpse of a baby girl. Her name was Rawand, and she was nine months old.
When her family returned to their home for the first time since the war yesterday, she crawled over to a small dark oval — a cluster bomblet — which detonated, killing her outright, and injuring her mother, and two of her boy cousins.
Only one doctor was on duty at Yarmouk yesterday — it shut down at the beginning of the week — and he left the grave diggers and went to try to save the family. Rawand’s father, Mohammed Suleiman, was inconsolable. ”I am going to kill America — not today, after 10 years,” he swore.
Battle at hospital
By the rubbish bins, the unknown man was barely breathing. His eyes were closed, and he could not speak. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor was brought, and he ran an intravenous drip into his arm from a trolley of supplies abandoned in the yard.
The hospital ceased to function on Monday when it became a main battle theatre between US forces and Iraqi fighters. But there was no time to tell the wounded streaming in from other parts of Baghdad.
”Many cars came from here and there. They didn’t know there was a battle. When they came, the American forces shot them,” said Mohammed al-Hashimi, a doctor at Yarmouk. A Volvo was hit directly opposite the hospital, a Volkswagen a few yards away, and an ambulance further down the road.
”There were injured people in those cars, and we wanted to treat them. We were in our coats,” Dr Hashimi said, tugging at his white doctor’s collar. ”We took a gurney to transfer the injured patients. They saw them, and they still shot them.”
He interrupted his story to beg a car to take Suleiman’s relatives to the nearest hospital — a paediatric centre. There was little the staff there could do.
”We are working with no anaesthetic at all,” said Iman Tariq al-Jabburi. ”The doctors are exhausted. There is no water to wash our hands from patient to patient. But what we really need is security.”
She summoned an ambulance to move the family — and the unknown man — to yet another hospital, Saddam medical centre, once the finest facility in a city known for the quality of its medical care, and now the only hospital with a functioning operating theatre.
Another doctor stepped out of the crowded ward, grabbing a cigarette from a passing ambulance driver.
”Where is freedom in Iraq?” he said. ”Where?” – Guardian Unlimited Â