Baghdad's "field hospital for the civil war"

[ck4829]

When U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad in 2003, they rolled right by Yarmouk Hospital. Hospitals all over Baghdad went unprotected from the looting that plagued post-invasion Iraq. And the looters came.

During the bombing just prior to the invasion, the ceiling of a room in the maternity ward had been pierced by a piece of falling debris--from an American missile or from Iraqi anti-aircraft fire.

This writer's tour of the hospital just two weeks after the invasion began with handshakes from a group of doctors, and this invitation:

"Now, let us see the destruction."

Two years later, a friend, his leg mangled in a car accident that killed his driver, was rushed to Yarmouk Hospital, only to arrive just after the victims of three simultaneous Baghdad car bombings.

Now, says one of Yarmuk's doctors, who has just finished a documentary on the hospital, Yarmouk has become a "field hospital in a civil war."

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2562.shtml