IT WAS the moment for which the Pentagon planners and the television network chiefs had been praying: the man who would be “king” of a postwar Iraq flies into his family’s home town to be crowned by his adoring people.
Instead, Ahmad Chalabi arrived in al-Nasiriyah, the town that was supposed to be the engine-room for Iraqi regeneration, to be confronted by fears of a cholera epidemic, spiralling crime, all-embracing misery and utter chaos.
There is no electricity here, no running water and no police. US troops are accidentally shooting children at checkpoints, small boys are playing football with unexploded ordnance and the hospital is overflowing with amputees.
There is simmering resentment at the American forces who overcame fierce Iraqi resistance here at a cost of about 400 civilian deaths and more than 2,000 injured. And wherever Dr Chalabi goes in al-Nasiriyah, a town of fewer than 500,000 people, he is met by cries of: “Ahmad who?” “I have never heard of the man, and I don’t know anybody who has,” said Moyed Ali, a young doctor at the town’s main hospital, which changed its name from the Saddam Hussein Infirmary to Nasiriyah General within hours of the arrival of the Americans two weeks ago. Nor has Dr Ali met anyone who attended a rally at the weekend at which Dr Chalabi was said to have addressed thousands of local people.
This may not daunt Dr Chalabi, 58, with his reputation for resilience. He left Iraq aged 13, and has rarely returned since, but after helping to form the Iraqi National Congress 11 years ago he has cultivated powerful allies in Washington.
Yesterday he was based at a camp in the desert outside al-Nasiriyah, surrounded by more than 100 armed Iraqi fighters. Killing time before a conference of opposition figures due to be hosted by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, tomorrow, he gave an interview to Breakfast With Frost on BBC television. Asked about his ambitions to lead the country, Dr Chalabi said: “I am not a candidate for any political position in Iraq. My main focus is to go home and work on the restoration of civil society in Iraq.”
Yet his arrival has bewildered many in al-Nasiriyah, a largely Shia town on the banks of the Euphrates, 120 miles (193km) north of Basra and 100 miles south of Baghdad.Many of its residents were proud to disclose yesterday that they had secretly been eager for the start of the war to topple President Saddam Hussein, and they declared themselves willing to forgive and forget their terrible losses: but they have become deeply pessimistic about the future.
At the hospital, staff complain of shortages of almost everything except painkillers. Without water, the 20-year-old, nine-storey building is becoming filthy and, with the breakdown of local government and shortages of fuel, piles of garbage are starting to rot in the corridors.
Patients are being admitted with gastroenteritis and severe shock, a sure sign of cholera, according to staff, although they cannot take blood samples to confirm their diagnoses because the hospital laboratory no longer functions.
Cholera was not unknown in the town before the war, but doctors rarely saw more than a case a month. Now they are reporting two suspected cases every eight hours.
The condition, an acute infection of the small intestine caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, exists mainly in poor countries with a lack of sanitation or in war-torn places when the infrastructure has collapsed. A supply of pure water, good food hygiene and an effective sewage system are vital to control a disease that is spread by ingesting water or food contaminated by the excrement of infected people.
Kudair Hazber Razaq, a senior physician at the hospital, listed the terrible sights he saw in three days of fighting for control of the town: the boy of 11 with a tiny chest wound who took an hour to die; the mother who arrived at his hospital trying to push her three-year-old daughter’s liver back into the child’s ripped abdomen; the middle-aged man who lost his right leg during the war against Iran, and whose left leg was amputated after his home was attacked by a US Cobra helicopter. “Perhaps in the next war I will amputate his right arm,” Dr Razaq said.
“I issued death certificates for 18 members of one family. We issued more than 300 certificates here, others were issued at local clinics and many people didn’t bother to register the deaths of their relatives at all — they just buried them in their gardens.”
With the cemetery full, freshly dug graves could be seen in playgrounds, wedged between swings and slides as children giggled and played.
Dr Razaq said that the number of civilian casualties was high because the Iraqi Army had placed tanks in schools and hospitals, while Fedayin occupied trenches in narrow residential streets.
With remarkable candour, given that Baath party members still live and work openly in al-Nasiriyah, Dr Razaq said that Saddam was “a cancer” who should have been “treated” long ago. “We failed to do that, and then we handed ourselves over to a surgeon. When a patient puts himself in the hands of a surgeon, he should accept that there may be complications. In al-Nasiriyah, there have been many complications.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-645780,00.html
Instead, Ahmad Chalabi arrived in al-Nasiriyah, the town that was supposed to be the engine-room for Iraqi regeneration, to be confronted by fears of a cholera epidemic, spiralling crime, all-embracing misery and utter chaos.
There is no electricity here, no running water and no police. US troops are accidentally shooting children at checkpoints, small boys are playing football with unexploded ordnance and the hospital is overflowing with amputees.
There is simmering resentment at the American forces who overcame fierce Iraqi resistance here at a cost of about 400 civilian deaths and more than 2,000 injured. And wherever Dr Chalabi goes in al-Nasiriyah, a town of fewer than 500,000 people, he is met by cries of: “Ahmad who?” “I have never heard of the man, and I don’t know anybody who has,” said Moyed Ali, a young doctor at the town’s main hospital, which changed its name from the Saddam Hussein Infirmary to Nasiriyah General within hours of the arrival of the Americans two weeks ago. Nor has Dr Ali met anyone who attended a rally at the weekend at which Dr Chalabi was said to have addressed thousands of local people.
This may not daunt Dr Chalabi, 58, with his reputation for resilience. He left Iraq aged 13, and has rarely returned since, but after helping to form the Iraqi National Congress 11 years ago he has cultivated powerful allies in Washington.
Yesterday he was based at a camp in the desert outside al-Nasiriyah, surrounded by more than 100 armed Iraqi fighters. Killing time before a conference of opposition figures due to be hosted by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, tomorrow, he gave an interview to Breakfast With Frost on BBC television. Asked about his ambitions to lead the country, Dr Chalabi said: “I am not a candidate for any political position in Iraq. My main focus is to go home and work on the restoration of civil society in Iraq.”
Yet his arrival has bewildered many in al-Nasiriyah, a largely Shia town on the banks of the Euphrates, 120 miles (193km) north of Basra and 100 miles south of Baghdad.Many of its residents were proud to disclose yesterday that they had secretly been eager for the start of the war to topple President Saddam Hussein, and they declared themselves willing to forgive and forget their terrible losses: but they have become deeply pessimistic about the future.
At the hospital, staff complain of shortages of almost everything except painkillers. Without water, the 20-year-old, nine-storey building is becoming filthy and, with the breakdown of local government and shortages of fuel, piles of garbage are starting to rot in the corridors.
Patients are being admitted with gastroenteritis and severe shock, a sure sign of cholera, according to staff, although they cannot take blood samples to confirm their diagnoses because the hospital laboratory no longer functions.
Cholera was not unknown in the town before the war, but doctors rarely saw more than a case a month. Now they are reporting two suspected cases every eight hours.
The condition, an acute infection of the small intestine caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, exists mainly in poor countries with a lack of sanitation or in war-torn places when the infrastructure has collapsed. A supply of pure water, good food hygiene and an effective sewage system are vital to control a disease that is spread by ingesting water or food contaminated by the excrement of infected people.
Kudair Hazber Razaq, a senior physician at the hospital, listed the terrible sights he saw in three days of fighting for control of the town: the boy of 11 with a tiny chest wound who took an hour to die; the mother who arrived at his hospital trying to push her three-year-old daughter’s liver back into the child’s ripped abdomen; the middle-aged man who lost his right leg during the war against Iran, and whose left leg was amputated after his home was attacked by a US Cobra helicopter. “Perhaps in the next war I will amputate his right arm,” Dr Razaq said.
“I issued death certificates for 18 members of one family. We issued more than 300 certificates here, others were issued at local clinics and many people didn’t bother to register the deaths of their relatives at all — they just buried them in their gardens.”
With the cemetery full, freshly dug graves could be seen in playgrounds, wedged between swings and slides as children giggled and played.
Dr Razaq said that the number of civilian casualties was high because the Iraqi Army had placed tanks in schools and hospitals, while Fedayin occupied trenches in narrow residential streets.
With remarkable candour, given that Baath party members still live and work openly in al-Nasiriyah, Dr Razaq said that Saddam was “a cancer” who should have been “treated” long ago. “We failed to do that, and then we handed ourselves over to a surgeon. When a patient puts himself in the hands of a surgeon, he should accept that there may be complications. In al-Nasiriyah, there have been many complications.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-645780,00.html
