- Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: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.
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- 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.
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- 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
ö the other three have been stolen or looted ö 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.
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- 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 ö 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 ö again with an arm out of the car window
holding aloft an IV drip.
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- 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.
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- The exact circumstances of their shooting was impossible
to clarify ö their relatives alleged it was American soldiers, but
this was not confirmed ö yet such scenes have become the norm here.
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- 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 ö two divisions short,
say well- informed sources within the Allies' reconstruction team.
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- 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.
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- 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 ö according to a
doctor who treated him ö 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.
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- This is the mess that Washington has deployed Paul "Jerry"
Bremer, a protg 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.
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- 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 ö 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.
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- 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.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=406657
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