Indian Nurses Tell of Iraq Escape Ordeal : Refugees: They talk of fear and frustration during an odyssey through a country that few want to see again.

At nursing school back in India, they didn’t tell them there would be times like this.

In a wind-whipped tent at a refugee camp on the Jordanian desert, a handful of bewildered but plucky young women Sunday told a story of fear, frustration and escape from Iraq.

They are the Indian nurses, a group totaling 112 who came to symbolize the confusion of the refugee trail out of embattled Iraq. At times over the past 10 days, they were reported to be at the Jordanian border, in Baghdad or headed for the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Nobody knew where on the trail they were, or why, and the Indian press and the diplomatic service were getting frantic.

Where were the Indian nurses? Mainly bouncing between Baghdad and the Jordanian border post at Ruweished, which they finally crossed Saturday night. On Sunday night they were scheduled to fly home to Bombay, ending an odyssey through a country that few of them want to see again.

“Would you return to the Middle East?” 24-year-old Shanmugan Priyadharshina, a native of Madras, was asked. “Maybe,” she said, “but never again to Iraq.”

She and Philomina Solai, 25, also from Madras, spoke on behalf of their fellow nurses in the perfect clipped English of formally educated women of the subcontinent. Both were trained to assist in cardiovascular surgery.

The ordeal of the operating room, however, was nothing to compare with the strain of the 10 months they worked in Iraq. They lost their earnings, they staged a fruitless strike, they lived on bits of bread and boiled Tigris River water, and they twice survived “Shellfire Alley,” the road from Baghdad to Jordan.

They shared a professional and caring relationship with the Iraqi doctors at Baghdad’s Saddam Medical City, the country’s finest hospital. But Saddam Hussein’s callous bureaucracy was another matter. “We are graduates. We are respected in our own country,” Priyadharshina said. “These people treated us improperly. They treated us like slaves.”

The nurses arrived in Iraq last April on one-year labor contracts, putting up 40,000 rupees each, more than $2,000, in agent’s fees and other costs from their own funds. “This is not simple money in India,” the young nurse said.

Their average age was 24, and few had been out of India before. They came for the money, at least $400 a month, depending on their specialties.

It looked good. The hospital provided them private rooms in a nurses’ hostel, “beautifully constructed, made by the Germans,” Priyadharshina noted. Meals came with the job.

But things quickly went sour. Iraqi labor contracts permit foreigners to send 60% of their pay home to their families. But when the Persian Gulf crisis began with Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, that privilege disappeared, the nurses said.

As the crisis deepened, other benefits, such as food, diminished as well. A phone call to India cost $65, and the hospital authorities would cut the line if the nurses began speaking English over the phone.

“They never fulfilled their part of the contract,” Solai said. “They lied to us and cheated us.” So in early October, the Indian nurses went on strike for five days, demanding better food and the right to remit their salaries to India.

“It was a failure,” she told three American reporters as an icy wind lashed the tent at the Jordanian camp. Other nurses, wrapped in blankets and sweaters against the cold, nodded assent. “They told us to go back to our duty.”

Despite their troubles and the war clouds gathering over Baghdad, the Indian nurses did their work and watched, like the rest of the world, as the Jan. 15 United Nations deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait approached. In meetings in their hostel, they made their decision. They wanted out.

The nurses asked the government officials assigned to the hospital to void their contracts and let them go. One administrator, a woman, told them: “There will not be any trouble. Anyway, if there is, you will die. Why don’t you die here?”

The male director of the hospital told them he could not help. “We are girls, and this is our first experience, and we didn’t know what to do,” Priyadharshina said.

On Jan. 7, the Indian nurses quit work, which shut down surgery at the hospital. Half of them moved into the Indian Embassy for safety, although it had no basement for shelter. The other half stayed to protect their belongings in the hostel, although it had no heat. The Iraqis, under pressure from the Indian Embassy, gave them exit visas on Jan. 15 but still insisted that there was no reason to go, telling the nurses, “Mr. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev are talking, and they won’t do anything to endanger the oil.”

The war started two days later, just hours before the nurses were scheduled to take a flight to Jordan and safety. The expected somehow came as a surprise. “We were sleeping,” Priyadharshina said, “but got up when we heard the noise. We thought maybe it was a festival. The shooting was like crackers (fireworks), no? Like we have at festival in India.”

After five days of bombardment, the Indian nurses broke for the border, riding in an embassy-provided bus through the terror of the air war. “Our bus was just shaking from the blasts,” recalled the 24-year-old. “The girls were crying. We all were praying.”

The next day they reached the Iraqi side of the border and parked. “The desert was full of mist and rain,” she said. They huddled in blankets waiting to cross. So close, but it would not happen that day.

The Iraqis said the Jordanians had closed the border (the Jordanians said the Iraqis had); and with no certainty when it would reopen, the nurses decided to return to the Indian Embassy in Baghdad rather than risk waiting in the open desert in the freezing cold. Besides, their exit visas were due to expire.

Back to Baghdad, another eight days in shelter, drinking water from the Tigris. What they saw of the city, the nurses said, indicated precision bombing by the allied aircraft. “The government buildings were damaged, but only a few private shops,” Solai said. “The post office on Rashid Street was completely gone. Just gone. But it was a telecommunications center.

“We saw some injured civilians, mostly suffering burns or cuts from flying glass.”

But they had seen enough to convince them of the danger. They got new visas and tried the border run again, this time successfully on Saturday. Huddled in a big green pop-up tent on Sunday, they dealt with another bureaucracy, Jordanian immigration. “All this month we are filling, filling, filling (forms),” Priyadharshina said, laughing. “We are still in the Arab countries, no?”

Meanwhile, word of their escape reached refugee officials, reporters and the Indian public who had been scrambling to trace the busload of nurses, which had seemingly disappeared into the desert mists.

Here in a Jordanian refugee camp the young women, not one with a scratch, seemed secure at last, but not fully convinced they were out of danger. “We will reach India safely, no?” Priyadharshina asked a reporter. “The plane will not have an accident?”