[Imc-beirut] Iraq Dispatches: Casualties of Polling

Wed Feb 2 10:08:23 PST 2005

** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **

    February 02, 2005

      Casualties of Polling

He writhes in pain, moaning with every other breath. The Iraqi police 
colonel’s chest is covered in bandages, his legs from the knees down 
nearly completely hidden from view due to thick bandages 
<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album33&id=legs> 
holding what is left of his shins together.

“We gave him first aid and requested a transfer because we don’t have 
any specialists left,” Dr. Aisha tells me, her name changed as requested 
since doctors are now technically forbidden to talk to the media or 
allow them to take photos in Iraqi hospitals unless granted permission 
from the Ministry of Health and its US-advisor.

And even then we are only allowed to talk with “spokespeople” at select 
hospitals.

Yarmouk would certainly not be on the top of their list of hospitals for 
the press to visit, as being one of Baghdad’s larger and busiest 
hospitals and located in the middle of the capital city the majority of 
casualties are brought here.

The colonel’s face is scrunched up 
<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album33&id=IP_colonel> 
as his pain is constant. Involuntary whimpers are audible as he squeezes 
his eyes closed from time to time, dreaming of relief.

“We sent him to a neurological hospital which couldn’t treat him because 
all of their specialists have left the country,” Dr. Aisha continues. 
Her frustration is expressed in her precisely spoken words, hammering 
out the details like a veteran on the front lines.

So the colonel was returned to Yarmouk untreated. He’d been guarding a 
polling station when a suicide bomber detonated nearby. The shrapnel 
turned his legs into hamburger and left his chest split open.

“I asked him not to leave the house, not to obey the Americans,” his 
wife who is standing nearby with their little boy and girl tells me, 
“But he said that he had to go or the Americans would cut his salary. 
And also because he said it was his duty.”

She looks over to him as another whimper emits from his contorted face, 
then looks back at me with anger flashing in her weary eyes.

“The Americans told him he should die with his countrymen! God damn them 
for what they have done to my husband! God damn them for what they have 
done to Iraq!”

We promptly thank her and hastily leave the room, not wanting to draw 
more attention to ourselves.

While walking towards the next room down the grimy hallway and broken 
windows Dr. Aisha waves a fly away from her face, as they constantly 
buzz around inside the hospital.

“He will probably lose his legs. All we have is rotator doctors and 
residents since all of our specialists left the country so they wouldn’t 
be kidnapped. I’ve been here two days straight without sleep,” she says 
as a group of nurses approach her to sign several files.

In the next room there is another policeman. His abdomen was blown open 
by a mortar blast at a polling station…he is holding a blue bandage to 
his face which caught some shrapnel 
<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album33&id=jahlil_hassan_ip>. 
Tubes run from his stomach off one side of the bed.

His father sees Dr. Aisha as we approach and begins talking to her, 
“This hospital is so dirty! I want to transfer my son! The care is 
horrible!”

She calmly explains to him that they are doing their best; without 
enough doctors, without enough cleaners, without enough nurses, without 
enough supplies, without enough medicine.

The angry father’s son is a 28 year-old policeman named Jalil Hassan who 
shifts uncomfortably in his bed. The room smells of rotten bananas and 
flies are everywhere. Anytime a nurse walks into the room of eight beds 
she/he is inundated with angry and stressed family members.

Nearby is a voter, 27 year-old Amir Hassan 
<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album33&id=voter>. 
His polling station was mortared as well. He caught shrapnel near his 
waist and is waiting for some pain medication that does not exist.

“We asked the Americans for supplies,” Dr. Aisha tells me later when we 
exit the room, “But they didn’t help us any. How can we continue like 
this? When an American private is badly wounded they fly him to Germany 
or America. Here we have high ranking police officers and Iraqi soldiers 
who are brought to this dirty hospital with no specialists!”

Abu Talat and I thank her for her time and for taking the risk necessary 
to bring us inside her hospital.

I notice new windows in her office-last time I was here they had been 
blown out by a nearby car bomb. This place turns into a field hospital 
every time a car bomb generates massive casualties, which is just about 
every day. I wonder how long her new glass will last.

I also notice the new white paint on a couple of the buildings. Abu 
Talat notices me looking at it in disbelief and begins laughing and 
holding his hands up.

Back out on the streets we head out to find some lunch. We have our 
usual ritual of his driving and fixing interviews simultaneously. As he 
holds the phone as far from his face as possible to find a number, I 
grab it from him to dial and he steers us back away from the side of the 
street.

“Name,” I ask. “Dr. Hamad,” he replies. I find it, dial, hand the phone 
to him and say, “Calling.”

“Thank you,” he says while we weave down the road a little further. He’s 
searching his pockets for his lighter as he holds the phone to his ear, 
so I light his cigarette and we straighten out again. We have this down 
to a science.

There are always a pair of his glasses on the dash-sometimes his reading 
glasses, sometimes his bi-focal specs which he never uses despite my 
badgering. I bothered him for a year to get new glasses and applauded 
him when he proudly showed them to me recently.

Of course now he never wears them.

The streets are filled with traffic once again after the election 
lockdown, trucks full of Iraqi Police wearing black facemasks battle 
their way through throngs of cars, aiming their Kalashnikovs at everyone 
in futile attempts to make their way forward.

“I feel very much threatened when I see those police or American 
soldiers aiming their guns at us,” states Abu Talat when a truckload of 
Iraqi soldiers rolls past, of course aiming their guns at us as they 
make their way through an intersection, “I don’t accept this.”

We stop to get some shawarma across the street from the Australian 
military outpost which was recently car bombed. I scan the building, 
chunks of it three floors up blasted off from the explosion.

A few days after the attack the nearby Australian embassy decided to 
relocate to “Camp Victory,” a large US military base.

Back in my room we watch the news while eating lunch and drinking tea. 
Storm clouds are billowing around the recent polling, as Mishaan Jiburi, 
one of the candidates, accused the electoral commission of deliberately 
failing to supply materials in Sunni areas.

Arab voters in the north who had planned to boycott the elections in 
Kirkuk decided at the last minute to vote so as not to lose the oil-rich 
city to the Kurds. Thus, not enough ballots were supplied, and now the 
plot thickens.

“I think the decision came from Baghdad,” Jiburi told reporters, “They 
were concerned with keeping the Sunnis out of the game.”

Just yesterday interim Vice-President Ibrahim al-Jaafari warned of the 
possibility of civil war if the US military withdrew from Iraq prematurely.

Keep in mind the “elections” were just three days ago.

_______________________________________________
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