Iraqi Hospitals Face Crises After Looting

B A G H D A D, Iraq, April 19, 2003 -- Before the war, Iraq had a well-regarded medical infrastructure — then came the looters.

At Iraq's only psychiatric hospital, Baghdad's Al-Rashad Compound for the Insane, hundreds of patients remained unaccounted for earlier this week after looters burst in and stripped what little there was of value from the hospital and the patients.

"They broke doors, they come inside, and then they attacked us," a male patient said.

Almost No Supplies

At the Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, the sick and wounded keep arriving, but there's little the doctors can do for them.

The looters took everything — bed pans, blood-pressure monitors and stethoscopes. Even the air conditioners in the emergency room were ripped from the wall.

"The wards are out of order because of broken glass, broken windows, and there's no electricity and no water supply," a nurse said.

Dr. Rasha Hatim, the hospital's director, said the bed linens and other items are dirty, and there was no way to clean them.

"This is not the ordinary state of our hospital," he said.

They did save a few syringes and medicines, and an asthmatic was able to get a shot so he could breathe again. The X-ray machine works, so they could help a boy with a broken arm.

But there was no way to treat a victim with a badly infected shrapnel wound, not even a thermometer to take his temperature.

With hardly any supplies, most of the 600 beds in the hospital, one of the largest in Baghdad, were empty. The staff was able to relocate a few patients to other hospitals, but simply had to send most home.

One wing of the hospital took a direct hit during the war. So did the morgue. There was nowhere to put bodies, so Hatim had to improvise.

"We tried to bury them here," he said.

He also posted a list. One man showed up looking for his brother, but did not find his name. Before leaving for another hospital, the man said, "Look what the Americans have done to us."

Americans did show up in force Tuesday under Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, with a new priority — to discourage looters, "to let them know we're here and to leave the hospital alone," Blount said.

One of Blount's officers tried to coordinate with an Iraqi doctor. But most ambulances that did get through the checkpoint were turned away, sent to other hospitals, only to be turned away again.

Cigarettes for Medicine

Psychiatric patients also were suffering.

Dr. Ameer Heylu, director of the Al-Rashad Compound, doesn't know what to do, because the looters took "everything — furniture, beds, medicines, foods."

He estimated Iraq has a quarter-million schizophrenics. He had no idea who will help restore the one mental hospital in a country that needs 100.

After the looting, patients badly needed daily medication, but the staff only had the nicotine of cigarettes, which they doled out to calm the patients.

Without their medications, some patients were catatonic. Some ranted incoherently. Some paced endlessly. Most appeared to have little, if any, hope.

"My room — they stolen, broken everything," one patient said.

Chronic schizophrenics fled through the fields. Before the war, the mental hospital had a normal capacity of 1,400. By midweek, only about 300 of the patients had returned.

Salima Tewfik, one who did, said looters threatened her with knives, so she hid with some of the nurses in a nearby school, then came back. She said she has hereditary schizophrenia and feels safer there.

Looters had stripped the kitchens. They stole the pumps from the wells so there was no water — nothing to clean with.

Leaders of the local Shiite mosque have offered help. They posted fliers asking people to return looted goods and were collecting them in the front yard of the mosque, but Heylu said early this week that little of use was being returned.