'Baghdad Hospital': A People With Grievous Wounds

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
January 29, 2008
Pg. C1
By Tom Shales, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sometimes a documentary becomes a document -- a historical artifact as well as an account of real people and events. When the narrator of "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone" says, "You won't see a film like this again," he isn't talking through his hat; the movie was made last fall under extremely difficult conditions. Perhaps because it was made by an Iraqi instead of an outsider, "Baghdad Hospital" gives you a more intimate sense of the Iraqi character than is usually presented on the tube. As compelling as it is unusual, the film -- premiering tonight on HBO -- is not a tract against U.S. military action in Iraq, but most of the Iraqis in the film refer to the war as an "invasion" of their country.
One can appreciate the anguished patriotism many express -- a love of country and a desperate longing for peace, something so remote and unlikely that it's spoken of as if it were mythical. Some of the Iraqi victims of violence are simply "Yankee-go-homers." And the film portrays the unimaginable suffering brought about by any war, and the heroic dedication of medical personnel whose fight is against time, among other things, as they race to patch up the scarred and mangled.
Most of the patients, especially in the emergency room, are victims of clandestine bombs planted by al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that kills men, women and children, military and civilian, indiscriminately. Whether the U.S. presence has strengthened al-Qaeda -- in numbers and determination -- has been debated widely but is not a topic here, except inferentially.
The film's views of life and near-death in the hospital were shot either secretly or after elaborate measures to obtain permission from hospital and government authorities. But the footage was always shot by a doctor who himself worked at Yarmouk Hospital, in what's called "the most dangerous part of Baghdad." The doctor wanted anonymity while he made the film; a prologue says that "to protect his identity, his words are spoken by an actor." But at the end, credits identify him as Omer Salih Mahdi.
Mahdi left Iraq last September (you won't wonder why) and is attending an American university on a Fulbright scholarship; an HBO spokesman says that is why he felt safe in putting his real name in the final credits. Obviously, it took courage to make the film, but it also took skill; Mahdi does an excellent job of recording and commenting on the chaos, panic and heroics that are part of everyday existence. Although the film is anything but slick, it doesn't look like Uncle Elmer's jumpy-bumpy home movies either.
Ninety percent of the cases brought into Yarmouk are "war injuries," the narrator says. Doctors struggle to keep up with the steady influx of battered and bleeding arrivals; their job is made additionally dangerous by the fact that al-Qaeda considers them targets, too, for the "sin" of treating Sunni and Shiite patients alike. One of the injured insists that "no Muslim would do such a thing to another Muslim," but the grisly evidence says otherwise.
More than one patient refers to the bomb-planting terrorists as "cowardly," the same adjective that was used to describe the fanatics who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. In the back of a crowded ambulance, injured Iraqis vent their anger against whomever they feel should be blamed. "Bring back Saddam," says one man bitterly. "It wasn't like this under him."
A woman laments, "They've made brother kill brother." A Shiite woman looks up and asks aloud, "Why is this happening to us?" And a male patient, perhaps blessedly unaware of the reality around him, hallucinates and speaks as if dreaming: "I'm not with you, my lover, I'm not with you. . . . We can both talk freely now."
In the hospital, one confronts the extremes of human cruelty and human compassion. Even here, people use humor to help sustain them. "Yesterday, it was Germany against Poland," says one medical worker, talking about a soccer match. A surgical team also talks soccer as they cut and stitch up an unconscious patient.
The camera does not dwell excessively on wounds or severed limbs, but there is one profoundly agonizing scene of a 6-year-old boy being held down while doctors and nurses try using rubber tubes to remove stray pieces of shrapnel from his small body. For some reason, they are unable to use anesthetic, and the boy's cries are both harrowing and heartbreaking.
Many brave doctors have worked at the hospital and stayed on, but many, understandably, serve their time and leave. "We're only human," the doctor-narrator says. "When it goes on and on, and no one can see any end to it, then it becomes very difficult to cope."
The film looks inside a terrible scar on the world and asks, hauntingly, whether it can ever really be healed.
 
Back
Top