Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Car bombs? In Iraq's Kurdish zone, almost a joke
Reuters
Sulaimaniya, Iraq, August 9, 2005
Asked when he last had to treat victims of a car bomb, Iraqi doctor Arif Anwar, an emergency room surgeon at Sulaimaniya's main hospital, dismisses the question with a smile and then starts to laugh.
"Car bomb? Are you joking?" he chuckles, as his white-coated colleagues in the doctors' lounge join the chorus of amusement.
"We don't have anything like that. The biggest problem we have here is car accidents -- too many car accidents," he says, shaking his head in dismay at the poor quality of local driving.
It is perhaps the starkest reflection of the huge contrast between the secure Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and most of the rest of the country, racked daily by insurgent violence.
The emergency room at Anwar's hospital, a newly built wing that wouldn't look out of place in Europe, sometimes doesn't handle a single emergency all day. On other days maybe 10 to 15 patients are brought in, the doctors say.
"Maybe someone fell off a ladder, or had an accident with machinery," says Anwar. "Sometimes there are domestic fights, and old people collapse in the heat, but that is it."
The pristine 500-bed hospital has advanced equipment like CT and MRI scanners, a well-stocked pharmacy and an outpatient clinic, facilities unknown to hospitals in Baghdad.
Yarmouk, one of the capital's busiest hospitals, sometimes handles 100 victims of suicide car bombs a day, runs out of anaesthetic regularly, has a bare-bones pharmacy and often no sheets on the beds. Women wash blood from the floors.
"Here we are a normal city and this is a normal hospital, we are happy doctors," says Anwar, who trained in Baghdad and spent six years working at the vast Medical City complex there. "I think doctors in Baghdad must be losing their minds. I will never go back," he says.
FOLLOWING THE LAW
The gulf between security in most of Iraq and the Kurdish north shows up not only in the experience of the doctors, but also in daily life. Every evening the streets of Sulaimaniya, a thriving city of around 700,000 people, are thronged.
Young men and women walk or sit together in the parks, while older men gather in cafes to drink tea and play backgammon. Restaurants are packed, music plays and the streets are alive -- in stark contrast to Baghdad and other troubled cities.
In Baghdad, the streets are crammed with 14-foot (3.5 metre) concrete walls designed to protect against bomb blasts, and many of them are blackened or pock-marked from shrapnel.
In Sulaimaniya there are no blast walls at all, except a ring of two-metre walls round the main hotel. In Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, such blast walls as do exist are painted with bright murals of flowers, waterfalls and gardens.
In the north, either there are traffic lights or smartly dressed police direct obedient traffic with glow sticks. In Baghdad, the roads are chaotic and the harassed, crumpled traffic police are abused from dawn to dusk.
A small boy who jumped through railings to dash across a main road in Sulaimaniya was whistled at by police, forced to walk back and made to cross at the appropriate spot. Cars parked in the wrong place are given $20 tickets -- and owners pay up.
In Baghdad, residents get only three or four hours of electricity a day, in Sulaimaniya they regularly get 20. The different way of life and mentality make some Kurds believe Kurdistan, as they call it, should be a separate country. Others, in Sulaimaniya at least, argue their region is an integral part of Iraq, and should support it as best it can.
Until that debate comes to a head, Kurds are determined to make the most of their relative good fortune.
"We are lucky here, it is true," said Anwar. "Here, my wife and family are happy. I cannot imagine living in Baghdad now."
© HT Media Ltd. 2005.