GENEVA, 9 April 2003 — International aid agencies yesterday warned that medical supplies in Baghdad were critically low and hospitals were stretched to the limit coping with wounded from heavy fighting inside the Iraqi capital.
“They have reached the limit of their capacity,” said Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Doumani told a press briefing by aid agencies that Iraqi surgeons and medical staff were working round-the-clock and running low on medicines and surgical equipment including anesthetics.
“When this conflict started we all said there were sufficient supplies in Baghdad for several weeks at least of normal medical operations,” said Iain Simpson, a spokesman for the World Health Organization. “This is not a normal medical situation and so supplies are running very low, particularly emergency supplies,” he added.
ICRC was delivering limited emergency stocks in the Iraqi capital, while the WHO said it was trying to gain access for a convoy of trucks from Jordan which was waiting with medical supplies for hospitals in Baghdad. Power cuts were also hampering work in hospitals and affecting water supplies, which were only being shored up with emergency generators.
“These are very temporary, emergency solutions,” Doumani said after contact earlier yesterday with the ICRC’s office in the Iraqi capital.
“The situation in Baghdad is starting to become critical especially with the power cuts,” she added.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a briefing note that the Al-Yarmuk Hospital in Baghdad was coping with about 100 wounded an hour. Another hospital, Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, was no longer capable of dealing with war wounded, it added.
The aid agencies were not prepared to give an overall estimate of casualties. “The key is that there is a large volume of civilian casualties,” Simpson said.
Aid officials also reiterated warnings about water shortages throughout central and southern Iraq, which are beginning to have a sharp impact on children.
“What we had believed would be a bad scenario is happening, there are more and more children suffering from diarrhea because of the lack of water, they drink contaminated water,” Damien Personnaz, a spokesman for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.
There were no reports of cholera, but there was “a high potential for outbreaks”, Simpson noted. The UN refugee agency, which had expected several hundred thousand Iraqis to flee the country, said it had still seen no sign of a mass exodus.
“We still have no information about any major influx into neighboring countries, we still have a trickle,” Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said. UNICEF estimated that about 10 percent of Iraqi children could suffer very high levels of psychological trauma after the conflict.
“The worst thing for children is to see their own relatives killed or to suffer,” Personnaz said.
Doumani told Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA that hospitals around Baghdad were “severely overstretched”.
She said she could not provide accurate details of how many casualties resulted from heightened fighting, but said at one Baghdad hospital she visited Al-Kindi, 150 people were wounded in the last 28 hours. “I cannot give accurate proportions, but among the people injured were women and children,” Doumani said.
An international anti-war consortium led by Marc Herold, an associate professor of economic development and international affairs at the University of New Hampshire in the US, estimated between 877 and 1,050 civilians have been killed since the war began on March 20, based on news reports from Iraq.
Germany said yesterday that it was donating another one million euros ($1.07 million) to ICRC for relief work in Iraq. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement in Berlin that the money was designated for humanitarian aid for injured soldiers and civilians, emergency medical help and improving water supplies.
