Omar Salih
USA TODAY
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BAGHDAD — Driving an ambulance in Iraq is a labor of love.
Drivers risk carjackings, roadside bombs and sniper fire -- all to save other people’s lives. If their ambulance does arrive safely at the scene of a bombing, then they often must face a confused, emotional crowd.
“People are in hysterical situations,” ambulance driver Hussein Mohamed Bressem explains, “so everyone wants to save his loved one.”
Bressem tries to pick up only the wounded who can be saved, but the crowd often takes over, pushing dead bodies into the ambulance alongside the living. Five people sometimes end up piled on a single gurney.
“We try to work rapidly and collect as many as we can,” Bressem says.
Before the U.S. invasion in 2003, there were only 80 ambulances to serve Baghdad’s 6 million residents. Now there are more than 400, according to Hashim Jabbar, the head of the ambulance directorate at the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
Insurgents often hijack ambulances, using them to deliver a second round of bombs to a site. The distrust is such that, when ambulance drivers near their destination, militiamen and bystanders often stop and search them several times.
“The delay makes us lose people,” Bressem says.
Since the beginning of the war, 25 ambulance drivers have been killed and 19 severely injured on duty, the Ministry of Health says.
A new fleet of ambulances -- GMCs and Toyotas -- are welcome additions, driver Qasim Mashkoor Aziz says: “They are fast, and I can escape.”
Aziz says he’s exhausted by the job, “but believe me, I still like the feeling of being able to help people when they need it.”
This month, Aziz tried to save an 18-month-old boy who was shot through the neck by sniper fire that followed a car bombing.
The boy was bleeding badly. Aziz took him straight to the Ibn Nafees Hospital in Karada “because I knew he needed a cardiovascular surgeon, and this hospital specializes in cardiovascular surgery,” he says.
However, the staff there was unable to find a good vein to start an IV and stabilize the bleeding. So Aziz took the boy to Al Uliwiya Pediatrics Hospital, where they opened two IV lines.
When Aziz brought him back to the heart specialist, however, the lines had stopped working.
Determined, Aziz set out again, driving through the night during curfew to get his cousin, who works at the general hospital and has experience setting IV lines. The cousin got the lines working, and the child went to surgery.
“I shall never forget how the faces of his parents changed. They were pale, and you could see the blood coming back when they knew,” Aziz says. “He is fine now.”