Doctor in the firing line

DR AHMED Ghanim’s nightmarish week began with a phone call in the operating room of a triage centre in downtown Fallujah. On the line was the manager of the city’s general hospital. Iraqi guardsmen and US Marines, said the manager, had entered the hospital, handcuffed the doctors and were forcing patients outside.

The guardsmen "stole the mobile phones, the hospital safe where the money is kept and damaged the ambulances. The Americans were more sympathetic," says Ghanim, an orthopaedic surgeon who normally works at the hospital.

But the worst was yet to come. In the following days, Ghanim would narrowly escape a bombing, then run through his city’s battle-torn streets, carrying with him memories of the people he could not save.

The fight for Fallujah began on 7 November. The hospital, the city’s main medical centre, was seized that night by US and Iraqi troops. Military commanders say it was taken to ensure there was a medical treatment facility available to civilians and to make sure insurgents could not exaggerate casualties. As fighting raged for a week, few civilian accounts were available and there were only scattered reports on casualties. But as combat eased, Ghanim and other survivors began to tell of the carnage and destruction.

Close to tears, he says: "I was doing amputations for many patients, but I am an orthopaedic surgeon. If a patient came to me with an abdominal injury, I could do nothing. We would bring the patient in and we would have to let him die."

Electricity to the city was cut off. There was no water, food or fluids for the patients but the patients just kept coming. "We were treating everyone. There were women, children, mujahids - I don’t ask someone if they are a fighter before I treat them. I just take care of them."

Then a bomb struck the triage centre. Ghanim ran out of the building. A second bomb hit, crashing through the roof and destroying the facility. Ghanim believes it killed at least three young resident doctors and most of the patients. "At that moment, I wished to die. It was a catastrophe," he says.

Afterwards, he ran through Fallujah, dodging explosions that seemed to happen everywhere. He took shelter in an empty house and did not move. "Time stopped. I don’t know how long I was there. The tanks hit anything that moved," he says. "I saw the injured people on the street, covered in blood, staggering, screaming, but we could not get out and help them because we would be killed."

AT ONE POINT, he looked out and saw his cousin in the street. He had been wounded. "I could not do anything for him. I could not move," Ghanim says. "He died. There was no mercy."

During a lull in the bombing, the doctor made his way through the rubble-filled streets. Some fighters, Fallujah natives like himself, recognised the surgeon. They showed him a way out. He walked with a companion - an anaesthetist - along the river, heading north.

It took them 36 hours, mostly on foot, to cover the 30 miles to Baghdad. They didn’t sleep, and ate only a few dates and a packet of biscuits. "Wherever we were, we expected to be killed. There was no safe area at all."

As Ghanim recounts, that horrendous week, he is clearly haunted by what might have been, and those he could not help. "I think if the Americans let us treat the injured, even in the streets, we could have saved hundreds," he says.