GENEVA/PARIS, 23 April 2003 — Hospitals in Baghdad are returning to work but at a diminished level following a wave of destruction caused by looting and fighting, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday. “The hospitals are virtually all working now, even if at a very reduced level because they suffered enormous damage mainly in the looting or in some instances because of military action,” ICRC spokeswoman Antonella Notari told journalists.

“Electricity has been partially restored in Baghdad, which has also made a clear difference to safety,” she added. As a result, doctors and nurses were returning to work, with many offering to help in other hospitals when their own were out of action, aid agencies said.

But sanitation in the Iraqi capital was precarious, according to the ICRC, with garbage piling up in streets in the hot weather and a sewage plant in urgent need of repairs. “In one part of the city, sewage is overflowing in the streets,” Notari said. Talks were also under way with US-led authorities to ensure that Iraqi health workers were paid, Notari said. A Red Cross aircraft carrying medical supplies was due to fly from Kermanshah, Iran, to Baghdad later in the day, while the ICRC’s international staff in the Iraqi capital were being replaced this week.

A relief group, however, warned yesterday that Baghdad hospitals are facing a “critical situation.” A third of them were either directly or indirectly affected by the US-led airstrikes, Premiere Urgence said in a statement after completing a survey of 30 of the capital’s main hospitals. The Paris-based group said two of the hospitals remained closed. A quarter of the hospitals were also damaged in a wave of looting by Iraqi mobs following the invasion. Ministries, museums and schools were also pillaged.

The hospitals were robbed of food and both medical and non-medical supplies, the group said. Seven were now being protected by the US Army’s Third Infantry Division, while the others were guarded by Iraqi civilians who are often stationed at the gates and perched on the roofs with Kalashnikov rifles.

Most doctors returned to their jobs after the looting subsided, but a majority of nurses and non-medical staff were staying away for fear of more looting, Premiere Urgence said. The group said sanitary conditions were increasingly posing a hazard, with garbage piling up uncollected and rats appearing in some of the buildings. It added that some hospitals have had to bury their dead in their gardens. Premiere Urgence has provided infrastructural support for Iraqi hospitals since 1997.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) also said Iraqi hospitals were operating in “disastrous conditions”, singling out Baghdad care centers as particularly hard-hit in a statement released yesterday. “It’s hell”, said Baghdad UNICEF bureau chief Hatim George. The hospitals urgently needed drinking water, electricity, medicines, and surgical equipment, he said.

As there was no rubbish collection in Baghdad, mountains of refuse have piled up outside hospitals including bloody bandages and even amputated limbs. In the Central Child Hospital west of the Tigris River, so many people were dying that bodies were buried on hospital grounds. Ten per cent of the dead were children, according to the UNICEF statement. About 2,000 people were arriving daily at city hospitals. Nine out of ten patients, as well as their wounds, suffered from severe diarrhea.

Meanwhile, UN agencies warned that their international staff still did not have security clearance from UN headquarters which would allow them back into Iraq with mass aid deliveries. “We will send international staff back into Iraq when we have the green light from New York,” Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said it was joining a UN security evaluation mission from Jordan into western Iraq on Tuesday. “It’s a crucial first step toward opening the way for large-scale UN humanitarian relief shipments and personnel to get inside Iraq,” IOM spokesman Christopher Lom said.