Final Proof That War Is About The Failure Of The Human
Spirit
by Robert Fisk
April 11, 2003
IRAQ
It was a scene from the Crimean War; a hospital of screaming wounded and
floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff; it stuck to my shoes,
to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped
the passageways and the blankets and sheets.
The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr
Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein's regime yesterday - sometimes
still clinging to severed limbs - are the dark side of victory and defeat;
final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is about
the total failure of the human spirit. As I wandered amid the beds and
the groaning men and women lying on them - Dante's visit to the circles
of hell should have included these visions - the same old questions recurred.
Was this for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction?
In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked hospital
trolley. He had a head wound which was almost indescribable. From his
right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the
floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the other so
badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that the only
way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to a rope
weighed down with concrete blocks.
Her name was Rawa Sabri. And as I walked through this place of horror,
the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris river outside, bringing
back to the wounded the terror of death which they had suffered only hours
before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach the hospital came
under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the medical center.
Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as doctors pushed
shrieking children away from the windows.
Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman Empire.
But her equivalent is Dr Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief surgeon,
a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who is
trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one generator
and half his operating theatres out of use - you cannot carry patients
in your arms to the 16th floor when they are coughing blood.
Dr Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it
is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been
wounded in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract
metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired to think,
let alone in English. As I leave him, he tells me that he does not know
where his family is.
"Our house was hit and my neighbors sent a message to tell me they
sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little girls,
they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because their father
had to work night and day at the hospital and they mustn't cry because
I have to work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they are."
Then Dr Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could not say goodbye.
There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound to the neck.
It seemed the doctors could not staunch his blood and he was dribbling
his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and sharp had cut into
his stomach and six inches of bandages could not stop the blood from pumping
out of him. His brother stood beside him and raised his hand to me and
asked: "Why? Why?"
A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had
to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn't have
the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl.
There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors
echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful, and it was followed
by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards.
Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in
three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and
legs; naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted
with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held
upwards, each beseeching a non-existing savior to rescue him from his
pain.
"No! No! No!" another young man screamed as doctors tried to
cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I
thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but
now he was a child again and he cried: "Umma, Umma [Mummy, mummy]".
I left this awful hospital to find the American shells falling in the
river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a small patch of
grass near the hospital's administration building and - "God damn
it," I said under my breath - an armored vehicle with a gun mounted
on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few meters inside
the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to conceal it..
And I couldn't help noticing the name of the hospital. Adnan Khairallah
had been President Saddam's minister of defense, a man who allegedly fell
out with his leader and died in a helicopter crash whose cause was never
explained.
Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its victims had to lie
in a building named in honor of a murdered man.
by Robert Fisk
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