Bomb-Weary Baghdad Like 14th Century

For the past two weeks in Baghdad, Dr. Rizek Jabr abu Kashef performed major surgery by candlelight.

He amputated legs of children without pain-killers, intravenous tubes or blood transfusions. He watched others die from infections for want of antibiotics or clean water for rehydration and, still others, simply from the cold.

In his little spare time, the Jordanian Red Crescent surgeon sat, freezing in a hospital with too little fuel for heat or consistent generator power; he read by candlelight about how to treat wounds from chemical and nuclear weapons blasts, in a future the doctor hopes will never come.

Such is life today in besieged Baghdad.

“The whole time, I am thinking we were in the 14th Century,” said Abu Kashef, who came from Baghdad to Amman for the weekend and plans to return Tuesday. “There are no telephones, no electricity, no water--even for scrubbing before surgery--and the air raid alarm is continuous, all-day, all-night, every day and every night. Nobody will even listen to it anymore.

“In the first two or three days, they listened. They ran to the shelters. But now, the alarm sounds and they go on shopping in the market. Now, they got used to it.”

Abu Kashef’s inside account of life in war-torn Iraq is just one of more than a dozen reports from foreign doctors, journalists and several Iraqis who have emerged recently. Together they have described the human impact in recent days of the most massive, continuous air assault on a nation since the U.S. carpet bombing of North Vietnam two decades ago.

As the allied war to force Iraq from Kuwait neared the four-week mark, the accounts continued to indicate Saturday that the relentless bombardments have claimed an increasing number of civilian lives throughout Iraq.

The pinpoint bombing runs also have demolished virtually every Iraqi communications center, every power station and most oil refineries, key bridges, military bases and airfields. The result, in effect, has been to push Iraq back a century.

Among the observations to emerge:

* Western journalists returning to Jordan this weekend confirmed reports that key Iraqi government ministries and some military commands have been relocated into schools and other civilian facilities, while elite T-72 tank squadrons have taken cover in palm-treed oases near villages or main roads, increasing the likelihood of more civilian casualties in the future.

* Popular support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is just beginning to show signs of fraying, particularly among middle- and upper-class residents of Baghdad, where once-unheard-of graffiti condemning the unchallenged leader has begun to appear, and where even the wife of an Iraqi air force officer told of seeing an angry woman, screaming condemnation of Hussein in the street.

* For most of bomb-weary Baghdad, though, the fear of their first few days and weeks under the bombardment has turned to a deeper frustration and anger. The majority of Iraqis now appear to blame the allies, more than their own president, for a war they believe no longer is aimed simply at driving Iraq from Kuwait but at punishing Iraq for growing too powerful militarily and economically in a region where Israel alone now predominates.

* And clearly, after watching every modern institution around them crushed by bombs, most Iraqis are increasingly convinced of what they dare not speak aloud--that ultimately, Iraq will lose, not just Kuwait but much of Iraq’s recent strides toward modernization as well.

One of the most poignant interviews with an Iraqi, filmed by several Western television networks visiting Iraq for the past week and smuggled out to Jordan, took place in Baghdad’s Adhemeya district on Thursday, the morning after several rockets destroyed a group of civilian houses.

Hassan Bayaji, an articulate Iraqi in his mid-40s whose sister’s home had just been destroyed, explained in perfect English that he did not believe that the pilots who fired the rockets had deliberately targeted the houses. Rather, he reckoned, the aircraft were aiming for the nearby Adhemeya bridge, a key logistics span over Baghdad’s Tigris River.

After the missile attack the previous night, Bayaji said he had helped sift through the rubble for human casualties. “They were shattered into pieces,” he said. “They were not whole corpses.”

He was asked whether the bombing runs have left Baghdad’s nearly 4 million people frightened: “You may say yes--but angrier, rather angry than frightened,” he replied. “When you are in the problem--in the crisis--you are frightened. But when it’s over, you are very angry.”

Bayaji was then asked about the legendary steadfastness that the Iraqis developed and promoted as a national trait during their eight-year war with Iran, and whether this war is different from the last one.

“It is very different,” he said. “We had the mastery of the air at the time, and once in two or three months, an Iranian airplane came. And they used to hit military installations--not civilians. Then, they (the Iranians) started hitting us with rockets. But only every 10 days, every 20 days, a rocket hit a part of Baghdad. So people got used to it.

“Now, it is something different. They don’t give you a chance to breathe. . . . And . . . we hear that 10 people were killed in that quarter, or 14 over there. They are not soldiers. They have nothing to do with the fighting. They are just the inhabitants of Baghdad.”

The Iraqis’ conclusion: “Now the target is the Iraqi progress, the Iraqi government, the Iraqi regime,” he said. “They are trying to get rid of our leader and our regime, and they want to pulverize Iraq and put an end to our economic growth. . . . It isn’t the liberation of Kuwait. It’s punishing Iraqis.”

In other settings in Baghdad and half a dozen towns outside the capital, the visiting Western journalists and Jordanian doctors, whose trips were unrelated, did encounter a handful of rare displays of political dissent.

One of the Western journalists, Richard Beeston, of the Times of London, quoted one man in his mid-40s who approached him and said, “This isn’t our war. This is Saddam’s war. He has taken the country back 40 years.”

Such comments were not publicized outside Iraq while the journalists were in Baghdad. They were routinely removed from news stories and television footage by Iraq’s official censors. And although Beeston, for one, did report them after leaving Iraq on Friday night, such accounts remain rare.

The iron grip of Iraq’s vast intelligence network remains largely intact, and most Iraqis have long been conditioned never to speak their real thoughts in public. With or without censorship, just uttering words of dissent remains dangerous in Baghdad.

But Beeston and the others detected other signs that Hussein’s grip is beginning to loosen, if only because of the massive physical damage the allied bombing runs have inflicted on the system he created to enforce it.

Hussein himself has not been seen nor heard by his people in more than 12 days. His key propaganda tool--state-run Iraqi Television--has been unable to broadcast, even locally, in Baghdad since the last of its facilities was demolished a week ago Wednesday.

Even Baghdad Radio, Hussein’s last public link to the world outside his secret command bunker, has been so badly damaged that it is often off the air or nearly inaudible.

Beeston and others found Iraqi draft dodgers who hid out for the first week or two of the war and have since emerged, more confident that Hussein’s secret police are now too disorganized and distracted to track them down.

On the badly cratered roads leading to Iraq’s strategic, bomb-ravaged city of Basra, recent visitors described seeing dozens of cheap wooden coffins draped in Iraqi flags--soldiers killed in the south and being returned to Baghdad. One Iraqi hospital orderly said that 20 to 25 civilians are being killed in Basra each day and that the military death toll in Kuwait and southern Iraq alone is now easily well into the thousands.

In Baghdad every day, as a handful of missiles or bombs continue to miss their military targets, the travelers said that hospitals routinely swell with civilian casualties--haunting images of bloodied, weeping women, hugging babies shredded by shrapnel, others with their own faces pocked or ripped by bomb fragments, still others lying burned in hospital beds.

“The biggest problem is we are just not able to provide real medical care,” said Abu Kashef of the Jordanian Red Crescent. “Really, you are giving only first-aid treatment.”

Abu Kashef, who insisted that he remains apolitical in the war, added that there are not even sufficient X-ray films or blood-typing kits to diagnose patients before surgery.

“If a patient comes with shrapnel, you don’t know where it is, so you go and explore in his abdomen,” he said. “There is too little blood, so you transfuse blood from one patient to another patient. There are no blood-group kits, so you just take a chance. There’s maybe a 10% chance the blood type is wrong, and the patient will die. But if you don’t give him blood, the chances are 100%.”

Abu Kashef--who has appealed to the United Nations and to humanitarian groups in the nations of the anti-Iraq coalition to sponsor large-scale medical-emergency shipments to Iraq--added that even anesthesia is running low. Operations, such as amputations, are performed with only light anesthesia. And soon, he said, there will be none.

“Really,” he added, “the whole thing is a 14th-Century war.”