[ppi] [ppiindia] Iraqi Hospitals Are War's New 'Killing Fields'

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901680.html?referrer=email

Iraqi Hospitals Are War's New 'Killing Fields'
Medical Sites Targeted By Shiite Militiamen

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page A01 



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.

"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!" 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," said the doctor, who 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 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 an 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.

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




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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