Tuesday, March 25, 2003

 

And, back in the real world . . .

Quoted from an interview with Robert Fisk, a reporter with the Independent:

AG: Last question- have you been to the hospitals of Baghdad?

RF: Yes; quite a few of them. The main visit I made was to one of the main government hospitals on Saturday morning after a pretty long night of explosions around the city in which of course quite a lot of these cruise missiles exploded right on their targets. Others missed them and crashed into civilian areas. I went to one hospital where-the doctors here are not Ba’ath party members- the chief doctor I spoke to was trained in Edinborough where he got his FRCF. He went very coldly down his list of patients and he had 101, whom he estimated 16 were soldiers 85 were civilians, and of the 85 civilians, 20 were women, 6 were children.

One child and one man had died in the operating theater during surgery. Most of the children were pretty badly hurt, one little girl had shrapnel from an American bomb in her spine and her left leg was paralyzed. Her mother was, rather pathetically, trying to straighten out her right leg against it as if both the legs, if pointed in the same direction, she’d somehow regain movement in the left side of her body, which, of course, she did not. Other children were on drip feeds and had very serious leg injuries. One little girl had shrapnel in her abdomen, which had not yet been removed. They were clearly in pain, there was a lot of tears and crying from the children, less so from the young women who had been hit- one woman was actually 17, they weren’t all young. In one case a woman and her daughter were there. The woman said to me that she had gone to see a relative and she had gotten out of a taxi, her daughter, whom I also spoke to, was standing in front of her and there was a tremendous explosion, noise, and white light, as the woman said. The girl was hit in the legs and the woman was hit in the chest and legs by shrapnel. They were lying next to each other in hospital beds. This is not the worst kind of injuries I have ever seen, and I’ve seen just about every injury in the world including people who’ve virtually got no heads left and are still alive, and I didn’t see that. But, if you’re going to bomb a country, you will wound and kill civilians; that is in the nature of warfare. We bomb, they suffer, and nothing I saw in that hospital surprised me.

posted by Miles 11:09 PM