Life is nightmare in Iraqi hospital

Swathed in a dirty grey blanket, the sores on her feet thick with flies, the young woman lay motionless on the concrete floor of the women's ward in the only psychiatric hospital in Iraq. Sometimes she cried – a low hoarse sound that seemed to come from the back of her throat – and the flies would rise in a cloud, only to settle again.

Her companions in the sun-burnt yard paid no attention. They were watching for the arrival of a rare vat of clean drinking water, clasping their cups close to their bodies as if afraid someone would steal them.

Conditions were never good at this hospital in an impoverished corner of Baghdad, but with the war they deteriorated sharply, according to hospital staff, patients and workers for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Al Rashid Psychiatric Hospital had about 1,400 patients before the war. But after looters broke the gates, most of the patients fled and are believed to be wandering the Baghdad streets, according to the staff. The patients in the rambling compound now number barely 300.

Looters rampaged through the hospital a few days after Baghdad fell, stripping it of furniture, its toilets, light fixtures, medicines and, most precious, the motor for its water-treatment plant, leaving patients thirsty and dirty.

Sudaw Audaw, 27, a gentle-faced nurse, tried to articulate the feelings of guilt and hopelessness that besiege her and many of the female staff. "I wanted to run away, but I didn't know where to go," said Audaw, who stayed at the hospital through the war and the looting although she had not been paid in weeks. "We lost control. We couldn't protect the patients," said Audaw, who along with some patients witnessed the lootings and arson.

The environment is one of fear, unimaginable filth and psychological chaos because the thieves took most of the hospital's store of antipsychotic medications and sedatives. Patients rave helplessly for hours, if not days. The International Committee of the Red Cross had worked with the hospital for years, helping the institution set up a small water-treatment plant so that patients would have adequate clean water. An ICRC psychiatrist even came to work there. He left before the war started.

Repairing the damage will take months and cannot be done without adequate funds, ICRC engineers said. The psychological damage will take far longer. "The looting was disastrous in this hospital," Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Baghdad, said last weekend. "Some of the patients were physically attack-ed, and many fled."

In the men's ward, some of the most disturbed patients are terrified when they see anyone from outside the hospital. Wearing soiled, sour-smelling blue and green-striped flannel nightshirts that hang to their knees, their lower legs bare and smeared with dirt, some of the men tremble as hospital staff, engineers and reporters come in and out. An older man with legs as thin as sticks and a grey stubble on his face closed his eyes and began to chant – perhaps in an effort to ward off inner demons: "Our blood, our soul, our souls for Saddam; our blood, our soul, our souls for Saddam."

He looked uncomprehendingly when a staff member tried to explain that Saddam Hussain is gone.
Another man, Mohammed Hamid Hussain, leaned against a wall in a soiled tweed jacket – unnecessary in the hot spring sun but a rare personal possession that the looters had left behind. Furtively, he tucked a packet of pills under his clothes. When he realised that no one would take them from him, he kissed them and held them out to a reporter to see.

It appears that at least some of the patients were political dissidents. According to Mohammed Abdul Sattar, an assistant manager at the hospital, about 50 of the 650 male patients before the war had been sent by the courts "because some of them had attacked the government, and so the judges have them brought here to evaluate whether they are a mental patient".

"I am here because of Saddam," said Karim Cobra, who described himself as a poet. "I'm not from the Baath Party. I had some ideas of my own."

The party, dominated by Saddam, was key to the leader's hold on power, and Cobra, whose family supported the regime, was afraid that his independent ideas would get them in trouble. "I came here to get some rest," Cobra said. Slowly it emerged that he was imprisoned for his ideas, tortured with electrical prods and then was sent here.

Could he leave now? Yes, with the permission of the doctor and the director, but after 12 years here, the outside world seemed filled with risks, he said.

Where would he live? "I do not want to go back to my family," he said.

Occasionally there are mom-ents of normality, even hope. Outside the tall iron gates of the men's ward, a short, sober patient in a long brown robe tied at the waist, like a Franciscan monk's habit, surveyed the relative freedom of the grassy central yard. After a moment he knelt by a large pink flowering bush, picked a blossom and bent his head to smell its summer scent.

A woman, lacking a mirror to comb and plait her hair, leaned this way and that to catch her reflection in jagged broken glass that is all that is left of the windows. But such incidents are rare. For the most part, the women's ward seems a land of the lost. Some of the patients rush up to strangers and kiss their hands, others lie in the unrelenting sun of the yard, too disturbed, depressed or dehydrated to move.

Six metal bed frames stand in each dormitory room; on them are soiled mattresses, too awful for even the thieves to steal. Some women lie curled in the squalor, others fight, pulling one another's hair like children.

Some complain that they have not been able to wash. The showerheads were stolen along with the light fixtures. With the latrines overflowing, some women have defecated in the empty dining room.

The woman covered with flies and lying on the edge of the yard could barely formulate words. Her name? Fatin. Her age? Thirty-one. Why is she in the hospital? "My parents threw me here," she whispered hoarsely, the flies thick on her face.

For Alia, 40, and Kawata, 44, the looters turned this place, which for all its limitations had offered them a bit of refuge, into a nightmare.

Birdlike, Alia looks nervously as strangers come and go. "We were sleeping when the looters came. We said there is no food, but they wanted to kill us. They had knives, and they hit us," she said. "I was scared. I started screaming."

Kawata stood shyly at the entrance to the women's yard, her shoulder-length dark hair well-brushed, her blue smock mostly clean. "Nothing happened," she said as she stared straight ahead, clearly in shock. "If my brother comes, I will leave."

Tears came to her eyes, she looked briefly out to the yard that lies beyond the hospital and then back towards the squalid women's ward. For her, there is no shelter.


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