Prologue
I stayed in my hospital Baghdad throughout the war and watched this unique chapter of our history come to an end.
There was no doubt that US and UK will fight this war against Iraq despite the massive opposition from the international community. We all knew that. In fact some of us hoped deep inside that this war would bring some change for good to our country.
Now I know we were wrong.
There is no occupation in the history of mankind brought prosperity to the invaded people. Even though the invaders sometimes claimed that they are liberators.
This is a diary of my memories of the war of 2003.
19/ 3/2003:
Although I was not on call this night, I decided to go to the hospital and spend the night there. I thought that I should be present with my colleagues when the first bombs fall on Baghdad.
Before the war, our hospital opened a temporary Emergency Room (ER). Usually our hospital as I mentioned earlier do not have such facilities for emergency cases, but that decision was part of the national emergency plan to equip all hospitals with ER facilities.
Due to the small size of our hospital, the ER held in the hospital across the road, which is Alwiya Hospital for Obstetrics and Gynecology.
It turned out to be a wrong decision as Alwiya Hospital was also a small hospital and did not provide much space for our temporary beds.
We arranged our beds in the lobby at the main entrance of the hospital. It was a long and narrow space which provided absolutely no privacy for our patients as hundreds of people pass by all the time from the main entrance to other divisions of the hospital.
The management of acute injuries should take place in ER beds in Alwiya Hospital, and later the patients are either transferred to our hospital for follow up or stay in the wards of Alwiya hospital temporarily.
On my way to the hospital, the streets of Baghdad seemed unusually empty and silence was everywhere. Baghdad has turned to a ghost town, and there was a sense of anticipation of the coming war.
I spent the night with the doctors in the doctors' mess which is a small room with a TV set for doctors.
The Iraqi TV was showing an Arabic movie and there was no mention of anything related to war that night on TV.
Some of the doctors held their radios and tried to listen to Radio Sawa, a station directed to Iraq from America. On that station, the news was about the build up of the military force that is about to strike within hours.
I went to bed at about 3 am. It was the last night of peace.
Tow hours later, we woke up on the sound of the first bombing of Baghdad.
I hurried to join the doctors and nursing stuff, but we did not receive any causality until late in the morning. Three hours after the first attack, we gathered around the TV to listen to the speech of Saddam. He was in olive green military uniform and a black beret. He was wearing a large pair of black-rimmed reading glasses that was unusual for him to wear.
He said that with the dawn prayers of this day the criminal Bush Junior, together with his allies, launched the crime that they'd been promising against Iraq. He urged every man in Iraq to fight back and to attack the criminals. He contained in his speech a poem, probably of his own writing and he called this war Um Al Hawasim (The Mother of Consummations).
By mid-morning, we continued to receive some minor injuries, and we listened to the conference of Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahhaf. He said of the Anglo-American coalition "I am sure that they are stupid, and they will never succeed...At the same time, this is a good testimony, a good proof that they are killers, they are criminals and they believed in assassination."
