http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14574337/
 
Iraqi hospitals are war's new 'killing fields' 
Medical sites targeted by Shiite militiamen
By Amit R. Paley
The <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/front.htm>  Washington Post
 
Updated: 6:50 a.m. MT Aug 30, 2006
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.
'Prefer now to die'
"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!'
"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," the doctor said when he
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 treat all victims'
"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 a still-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.
'All we want is security and safety'
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.


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