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Sept 24: Hospitals Attest To Disorder in Iraq

By James Rupert | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

September 24, 2003

Basra, Iraq - At Al-Faiha Hospital yesterday, emergency room workers were mopping up the blood from the latest gunshot victim to be carried through the doors. He had been shot in the head by a gang that stole his car, said an attendant, Abbas Ali Auda. Even were the hospital functioning normally, he would likely die. But Al-Faiha is having to re-use syringes, is using common staples as lancets to draw blood for tests and lacks painkillers and other basic drugs.

The partly functional hospitals of central and southern Iraq are struggling with a wave of shootings that arise from crime, clan warfare or revenge attacks. President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials describe an Iraq that is slogging steadily toward calm and order, but most Iraqis interviewed in the center and south in recent weeks said U.S.-occupied Iraq remains in chaos.

After five months of U.S. rule, "people can't understand how it is possible that our conditions of life are as bad, or worse, than under such a terrible dictator as Saddam Hussein," said Dr. Osama Ghalib, an internist at the Basra Teaching Hospital. Parts of Basra, a city of about 2 million people that is the country's second-largest, get as little as three hours of electricity per day, down from 12 hours under Hussein, residents said.

Daytime temperatures have cooled from their summer peak of 120 degrees to a mere 100 or so, but many people have no access to drinkable water. Vengeance killings, clan and tribal clashes and other crime - murders, kidnappings and carjackings, for example - have exploded compared with before the war.

The overwhelming majority of about 50 Iraqis interviewed in the past 12 days voiced gratitude to the United States for toppling Hussein, and many said they hoped that, by cooperating, they could bequeath their children better lives than those today. But in the center and south - home to about 75 percent of the population - those hopes seem to be declining, and the U.S.-led foreign forces are seen increasingly as occupiers rather than liberators.

"We do not know who will be the future leaders of Iraq, but we know that they are being forged in this current climate," said a Western civil servant working in the country. And the current conditions "are not favorable to creating a government of Iraqis who will cooperate with America. They are favorable to giving power to extremists who oppose America and the West."

U.S. officials and Iraqis agree that the key to stabilizing this country is to make it secure enough that reconstruction work, investment, education and political dialogue can happen. U.S. officials concede that American forces are fighting a guerrilla war they did not expect in the central zone dominated by Sunni Arabs but portray that as a distracting aberration. "I would like to remind you that 95 percent of this country is at peace ... and supportive of the [U.S.] efforts," occupation authority spokesman Dan Senor told reporters last week.

The best place to gauge peace or chaos is at Iraq's hospitals and morgues. Doctors describe not peace, but a nightly toll of bloodshed. Dr. Abdurrazak al-Obaidi helps supervise autopsies at Baghdad's Institute of Judicial Medicine, which is supposed to examine all cases of violent death in the capital.

"Before the war, we used to receive seven to 10 bodies per day," he said. "Now, we are getting 20 to 35 each day." Gunshot deaths used to represent less than 5 percent of the cases and "now it is about 90 percent," he said.

Basra Teaching Hospital, one of four major hospitals in the city, has gone from recording two to three violent deaths per month to about five per day, said Hassan Omran of the hospital's statistics department. In each city, an unknown number of killings go unrecorded. Many families cannot afford to take the bodies to hospitals, where autopsies and death certificates may cost the equivalent of one to two weeks of family income.

Aside from the collapse of policing, the doctors can only guess at the precise roots of this wave of killing. From interviewing families of the dead, "I think this is mainly vengeance killings and random crime," said al-Obaidi in Baghdad.

In Basra, doctors say most of the killing comes from turf battles or organized crime involving some of the more than 500 tribal and clan groups in the province. They suspect that former members of Hussein's secret police are helping organize the violence to undermine British forces trying to bring order.

Among the incidents, unidentified gunmen attacked a center-city police station Sunday, injuring nine officers with a grenade and automatic rifle fire.

Members of two clans fought in Abul Khassib, a village south of the city, last week, killing five people.

Looting of power lines and oil fields has deepened electricity and fuel shortages. Along the highway to Baghdad, pylons of a high-voltage power line lie crumpled in the desert, and long stretches of their cables are missing.

Gangs are smelting the cables for copper, which British authorities have intercepted as it was being smuggled into nearby Kuwait. They've also found barges of oil being sneaked out. Not even livestock is immune: The theft and smuggling of sheep has raised prices for lamb by 60 percent in recent months.

For the United States' effort to win Iraqis' support, the most dangerous part of the postwar bloodshed is the killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops. With soldiers facing frequent attacks by guerrillas, their standing orders continue to stress quick defensive reactions against any perceived threat. In the past nine days, U.S. forces have conceded the accidental killings of 12 civilians; other published incidents in that period - reported by Iraqis but unconfirmed or disputed by U.S. officials - have included four more deaths.

In the latest case, U.S. aircraft fired a half-dozen missiles into a farmhouse north of Fallujah before dawn yesterday, killing three men, witnesses and hospital officials told news agency reporters. A U.S. military spokeswoman said she knew of only one death and said the air strike was in response to an attack on U.S. troops in the area.

Such deaths by U.S. fire, whether provoked or not, reinforce the transformation of U.S. troops from perceived liberators into occupiers, Iraqis and Western diplomats said.

U.S. forces are "too aggressive and too isolated," Aqila al-Hashimi, a member of the U.S.-appointed interim Governing Council, said recently. Days afterward, al-Hashimi was shot in an assassination attempt, and she remains in serious condition.

A senior official of the occupation authority conceded that Americans here are isolated. Occupation officials in Baghdad live in what they call the "green zone," a heavily defended center-city enclave that few Iraqis can reach, and only via a 200-yard maze of razor wire, document checks and a body search.

The rest of Baghdad is considered "the red zone." For European diplomats who live there, as well as for the Americans, "we cannot move anywhere unless we have armed guards with us," a diplomat said. "So we have no contact with what is happening in the streets."