UMM QASR, Iraq, 11 April 2003 — This is the place, just several miles from the Kuwait border, that American and British officials say is doing best among Iraq’s southern cities, the place where water is most plentiful, where there are no problems with food and where medical care is available for those who need it.
Perhaps it is doing better than other cities but Umm Qasr is not doing well at all. A lot of people are sick, old people and babies especially. Sewage bakes on streets. Garbage steams in the air.
Even as Baghdad was being looted Wednesday, as the Saddam regime fell, and as this place had a right to finally feel free, people had other things on their mind: finding that drinking water, that food, that medical care that was supposed to be so available.
The situation here appeared dire Wednesday, far worse than described by military officials over the past three weeks, when most journalists were kept away.
Young boys, young girls stand on virtually every roadway, then dart toward passing military trucks, the cars and trucks of journalists, anything that looks as though it may have clean water or food inside, and they yell the few English words they know: “I love you! I love you! Water? Water?’’ Sometimes they put in extra effort with a salute, more often with a thumbs-up.
They stand barefoot in a sun that heats rocks like coals. Every breeze carries with it the tradeoff of a fresh layer of dust that falls upon them. Their hands pick through steaming garbage strewn across block-long patches of desert. They compete with shaggy, long-haired goats who nibble at the same scraps, and defecate there, too. Fleas are everywhere and bite like dogs. Dogs are everywhere and flit like fleas.
In the only hospital here, women in their chadors hold sick toddlers by their hands or in their arms. Large groups of the women, and a few men, crowd outside the door to the hospital’s only doctor, begging him to please, please see their child next. The bathrooms in the hospital are no more than holes dug into dirt floors, a bit of metal placed over them.
Pictures of Saddam are splotched with red paint. At one site, which resembled an outdoor altar, his picture had been torn down and where his face had been and scratched in its place was a heart. But, still, for various reasons, people here did not feel entirely free. “Freedom is not here because there is no water, no food, no news, no radio, no television,’’ said Halid Al-Edan . “Where is the UNICEF? Where are the foreign countries to help us?’’
Humanitarian aid groups such as UNICEF and the Red Cross, among many others, have poked inside here in recent days assessing what is needed and trying to structure a distribution system that will not favor the strong and more aggressive at the expense of those who need help most.
It will take them days more to move supplies in here, days after that to achieve any substantial relief. And this is a small city, with 45,000 people or so. Basra, slightly to the north and by several accounts in the same miserable shape, is a city of more than 1.5 million.
Most of the misery did not come suddenly, born of a three-week-old war, although there was more water here before the fighting than there was Wednesday. Rather, this is misery built over more than 30 years of Saddam’s rule, a calculated oppression that has kept the people here poor.
In three hours Wednesday, from 8 in the morning until 11, the doctor at Umm Qasr’s only hospital saw 350 people or so, by his count.
In a hospital room in the back, a woman named Nadia Ahmad begged a nurse, please, could she get her father to a hospital in Kuwait? He lay on a piece of foam covered with a white bed sheet which was smeared with red where his right arm rested, a tube stuck in it to replace the blood he was losing through a deep wound in his leg. Bandages will not stop the loss because the bomb that injured him did not cause a gash but instead destroyed a softball-sized piece of flesh, too much loss to be sewn shut.
On the walls around him, white dust from falling plaster mixed with the brown dust from the desert, and the washed yellow paint on the walls around him was peeled.
“The bomb came 12 days ago,’’ she said. “Still there is no help.’’
Pvt. Benjamin Keegan said the city has calmed considerably in the past few days, and that calm has allowed the aid workers in to assess.
