Distrust divides Iraq's doctors and soldiers

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20050328/ts_usatoday/distrustdividesiraqsdoctorsandsoldiers&cid=676&ncid=1473

For 24 hours, Yarmouk Hospital emergency-room physicians worked without sleep, caring for about 40 victims of two car bombings that rattled the capital on March 2. Their white smocks were stained red. They were exhausted.


By 9:30 a.m. the following day, the night had given way to relative calm. Physician Khalid Khalil al-Kaki, 37, had just completed his morning rounds and had not yet changed his clothes from the day before. A detachment of Iraqi soldiers, brandishing their rifles, stood by nine wounded soldiers in an operating area the doctors try to keep sterile.


Just then the mobile telephone of one of al-Kaki's colleagues, physician Nawzad Fwad Hussein, 30, rang. Without provocation, the two doctors say, three soldiers seized Hussein. They dragged him to their commander, a lieutenant, who knocked him down with the butt of his rifle and ordered him beaten.


Far from an isolated episode, violent scuffles between Iraqi soldiers and doctors are an occupational hazard in Iraq, the emergency-room physicians say. The hospitals can contain a combustible mix. Iraqi soldiers and police are the targets of near daily attacks and bombings. They have watched hundreds of their colleagues die. Overworked doctors and nurses in Iraq's poorly equipped hospitals routinely deal with mass casualties that would overtax far bigger, better-equipped facilities.

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