Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102100106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK FINEMAN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: AMMAN, JORDAN LENGTH: Long
He amputated legs of children without pain-killers, intravenous tubes or blood transfusions. He watched others die from infections for want of antibiotics or clean water for rehydration, and, still others, simply from the cold.
In his little spare time, the Jordanian Red Crescent surgeon sat freezing in a hospital with too little fuel for heat or consistent generator power; he read by candlelight about how to treat wounds from chemical and nuclear weapons blasts, in a future he hopes will never come.
Such is life today in besieged Baghdad.
"The whole time, I am thinking we were in the 14th century," said Abu Kashef, who came from Baghdad to Amman for the weekend and plans to return Tuesday. "There are no telephones, no electricity, no water - even for scrubbing before surgery - and the air raid alarm is continuous, all-day, all-night, every day and every night. Nobody will even listen to it anymore.
"In the first two or three days, they listened. They ran to the shelters. But now, the alarm sounds and they go on shopping in the market. Now, they got used to it."
Abu Kashef's account of life in war-torn Iraq is just one of more than a dozen reports from foreign doctors, journalists and several Iraqis who have emerged recently. Together they have described the human impact in recent days of the most massive, continuous air assault on a nation since the U.S. carpet bombing of North Vietnam two decades ago.
As the allied war to force Iraq from Kuwait neared the four-week mark, accounts continued to indicate Saturday that the relentless bombardments have claimed an increasing number of civilian lives throughout Iraq.
The pinpoint bombing runs also have demolished virtually every communications center, every power station and most oil refineries, key bridges, military bases and airfields. The result, in effect, has been to push Iraq back a century.
Among the observations to emerge:
Western journalists returning to Jordan from Iraq this weekend confirmed reports that key Iraqi government ministries and some military commands have been relocated into schools and other civilian facilities, while elite T-72 tank squadrons have taken cover in palm-treed oases near villages or main roads, increasing the likelihood of more civilian casualties.
Popular support for President Saddam Hussein is just beginning to show signs of fraying, particularly among middle- and upper-class residents of Baghdad, where once-unheard-of graffiti condemning the unchallenged leader has begun to appear, and where even the wife of an Iraqi air force officer told of seeing an angry woman screaming condemnation of Hussein in the street.
For most of bomb-weary Baghdad, though, the fear of their first few days and weeks under the bombardment has turned to a deeper frustration and anger. The majority of Iraqis now appear to blame the allies, more than Saddam, for a war they believe no longer is aimed simply at driving Iraq from Kuwait, but at punishing Iraq for growing too powerful militarily and economically in a region where Israel alone now predominates.
And clearly, after watching every modern institution around them crushed by bombs, most Iraqis are increasingly convinced of what they dare not speak aloud - that ultimately, Iraq will lose, not just Kuwait but much of Iraq's recent strides toward modernization as well.
One of the most poignant interviews with an Iraqi took place in Baghdad's Adhemeya district Thursday, the morning after several rockets destroyed a group of civilian houses.
Hassan Bayaji, an articulate Iraqi in his mid-40s whose sister's home had just been destroyed, explained in perfect English that he did not believe the pilots had targeted the houses. Rather, he reckoned, they were aiming for the nearby Adhemeya bridge, a key span over Baghdad's Tigris River.
Bayaji said he had helped sift through the rubble for human casualties. "They were shattered into pieces," he said. "They were not whole corpses."
This war is far different, Bayaji said, from the eight-year war with Iran:
"We had the mastery of the air at the time, and once in two or three months, an Iranian airplane came. And they used to hit military installations - not civilians. Then, they [the Iranians] started hitting us with rockets. But only every 10 days, every 20 days, a rocket hit a part of Baghdad. So people got used to it.
"Now, it is something different. They don't give you a chance to breathe. And . . . we hear that 10 people were killed in that quarter, or 14 over there. They are not soldiers. They have nothing to do with the fighting. They are just the inhabitants of Baghdad."
The Iraqi's conclusion: "Now the target is the Iraqi progress, the Iraqi government, the Iraqi regime," he said. "They are trying to get rid of our leader and our regime, and they want to pulverize Iraq and put an end to our economic growth. It isn't the liberation of Kuwait. It's punishing Iraqis."
In Baghdad every day, the hospitals routinely swell with civilian casualties.
Abu Kashef, who insisted he remains apolitical in the war, said there are not enough X-ray films or blood-typing kits to diagnose patients before surgery.
"If a patient comes with shrapnel, you don't know where it is, so you go and explore in his abdomen. There is too little blood, so you transfuse blood from one patient to another patient. There are no blood-group kits, so you just take a chance. There's maybe a 10 percent chance the blood type is wrong, and the patient will die. But if you don't give him blood, the chances are 100 percent."
by CNB