Irak 237

'Iraq's Anatomy—Triage at a Baghdad Hospital

Interview: An Iraqi doctor-turned-journalist takes us into a rarely glimpsed Iraqi war zone—the ER.
By Casey Miner
January 28, 2008
If you need a blood transfunsion at Baghdad’s Al Yarmouk hospital, you can get one—so long as someone's there to donate blood on your behalf. If you need an operation, you can have one of those too—though your only anesthetic might be your friends and family holding you down. One big explosion can dry up the hospital's saline supplies for a week, leaving the next explosion's victims without the necessary treatment. And where triage is within a war zone doctors and ambulance drivers are regularly threatened and harassed.
Instead of respites from the chaos outside, hospitals in Baghdad are some of the city's most dangerous places. They have also been mostly closed to journalists. Until now. Iraqi filmmaker and former doctor Omer Salih Mahdi spent six weeks filming life inside Al Yarmouk and out on the streets with the hospital's ambulances. His documentary "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone," premiering tomorrow night on HBO, offers a rare and raw glimpse into the day-to-day workings of what he calls "a field hospital in a civil war," far from American soldiers and at the mercy of the warring forces that cause chaos both inside and outside its walls.
"You won't see a film like this again," warns Dr. Mahdi. Stymied by aggressive militiamen, nervous doctors, and the threat of insurgents, the filmmaker braved beatings, interrogations, and death threats. His safety in the hospital was so precarious, he says, that in the end he chose to stop filming altogether because the director of security—the man who approved the project and allowed him in the hospital each day—was shot and killed. "Several times I thought the film would never happen," he says.
What is most evident from the footage Madhi did manage to capture is the chaos. From ambulances and hospital beds, injured Iraqis wonder aloud why their countrymen are fighting one another. Far from harboring radical sectarian views, these civilians seem overwhelmed and bewildered, not only by the violence but by the sheer number of perpetrators. Towards the end of the film, the camera stays for several minutes with three people in an ambulance, all yelling and very angry, saying they want Saddam back. "It's how Iraqis think now," says Dr. Mahdi. "They say that they wish they could go back to Saddam's days. They weren't good days. They were bad in different ways, but at least people had security."'

Lees verder: http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2008/01/iraq-anatomy-triage-at-a-baghdad-hospital.html