Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
Calls have increased as work conditions remain dangerous
By JAMES PALMER
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
BAGHDAD, IRAQ — Mahdee Hussein has one of the most gruesome jobs in Iraq: collecting bodies and body parts from the streets.
Before the insurgency, said Hussein, 54, a lean man with dark bags under his eyes, car accidents were his biggest problem, generating 15 to 20 bodies a month. Today, the number is closer to 150, and the work is more daunting: bodies torn by explosions; bodies handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into the streets; and even bodies cut open and packed with explosives so they can be detonated when crowds gather to examine the corpses.
Hussein has 29 years of experience, but he said the past three have taken a heavy toll on his health. He said he must have his stomach pumped at least once a month to cope with severe pain that he believes results from his unsanitary handling of body parts.
He is paid the equivalent of $140 per month and receives little in the way of supplies or support from the government, often working without gloves or a mask. His crew, like most teams of emergency workers in Baghdad, is more responsible for clearing corpses and cleaning the streets than caring for the living.
Despite the circumstances, Hussein said he has no other employment options, and still believes the work is important.
“The dead body is sacred,” Hussein said. “It must be treated carefully and with respect no matter what the circumstances.”
‘Insulting and frustrating’
In increasingly complicated Iraq, ambulance workers such as Hussein face a unique set of challenges and conditions.
Workers must dodge assaults by insurgents who try to steal their vehicles and use them in bombing attacks. Security forces, weary of the tactic, closely scrutinize the movements of ambulances, and emergency workers have been interrogated and jailed. Meanwhile, the teams that actually have time to treat the living often must deal with violent families that are upset with slow response times.
“This work is insulting and frustrating,” said Majeed Lafta, 43, an ambulance driver who has been on the job for eight years. “We’re providing a humanitarian service and not making any fuss about our poor working conditions, because if we don’t do our jobs, more people will die.”
Members of Baghdad’s ambulance crews are among the government’s lowest-paid civil servants. And Iraq’s first aid directorate must confront severe money and supply shortages as it attempts to serve a city of more than 6 million people.
Lack of supplies
Hashem Jabbar, the doctor who leads the directorate, said only one-third of Baghdad’s 229 ambulances can be used. The government ordered 300 new vehicles from a GMC affiliate in Montreal at $74,000 each, but Jabbar said he isn’t certain if anyone has been trained to repair them. And fuel shortages force ambulances to wait in line at the pumps like most Iraqis.
The service’s dispatch center, which links the city’s emergency response units, has 10 telephone lines, but only five were operating on a recent morning.
The unit’s 750 emergency workers go out in teams of three and wear street clothes because they have no uniforms. Each team has a driver, a nurse and a medical assistant, and they work 24-hour shifts every three days. Crews supplement their salaries with tips.
Jabbar said the city’s ambulances rarely contain more than a gurney and an oxygen tank, and the health ministry does little to train the workers.
Deadly profession
The hazards of the job seem to come from every direction.
Last year, eight emergency workers were killed on duty, according to the first aid directorate.
Three workers have been killed this year -- two when they responded to a vehicle bombing in Mahmudiayh, only for another explosion to be set off; and another who was shot dead in Amariyah.
As evidence of his encounters with violence, Lafta pointed to scars on his face.
He said a group of knife-wielding insurgents charged him in 2003 and tried to hijack his ambulance as he was driving in west Baghdad.
He said an angry mob attacked him in 2004 in the Adamiyah section of Baghdad after he began sifting through bodies following an explosion, looking for survivors.
“They didn’t know who I was because I have no uniform,” Lafta said. “They thought I was desecrating the dead, so they started to beat me.”
And in December, he said, a distraught family who had watched an elderly relative die in his ambulance en route to a hospital attacked him.
Subject to searches
The past year has been especially difficult, the ambulance drivers said.
After terrorists detonated an ambulance packed with explosives in Youssifya, south of Baghdad, during a wedding party in January 2005, security forces have been more aggressive with emergency service workers.
Iraqi police and military and coalition forces regularly stop ambulances to search the vehicles and passengers during emergency runs, especially at night.
“It’s difficult to go out at night,” said Adel Taweefiq, 45, a manager at the first aid directorate’s dispatch center. “We’re shot at by the security forces and the insurgents. Some of the areas we have to go into are so dangerous that not even the police and military go there after dark.”
Col. Adnan Al-Kafaji, an interior ministry official, said emergency vehicles are given special consideration, but security forces must search them as they do all vehicles during heightened periods of terrorist threats.
Ambulance squads respond to 50 to 80 calls per day on the city’s 1-2-2 emergency number, Jabbar said. When not dealing with the fallout from vehicle bombings and improvised explosive devices, calls can range from pregnancies to heart failure.
There is one other constant problem, the drivers said: traffic.
In the United States, ambulance response times can be as little as three minutes. In Baghdad, the average is closer to 15 minutes because traffic often is choked to a standstill.
Complicating the problem are drivers who seemingly have no respect for the blaring sirens and spinning blue lights atop the ambulances.
Waleed Abbas, 48, a tailor, said traffic delayed emergency workers for almost four hours en route to his house after he suffered a heart attack last year.
“It nearly cost me my life,” Abbas said.
Aryan Ammouri, 32, a taxi driver, said he believes ambulances not carrying patients too often use their lights and sirens to pass traffic for their own convenience.
“I sit in traffic for two or three hours at a time,” Ammouri said, “and I’m not giving up my place to anyone.