Ambulance crew shows there are everyday heroes in a tragic place
By Leila Fadel
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Hassan Abdulrazak, KRT
Arkan Ali, a Kurdish paramedic, prepares for a patient inside the ambulance while Raed Sadaq Karim, the Sunni Arab driver looks on.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Over the loudspeaker, ambulance driver Raed Sadaq Karim's voice boomed out over the barely moving cars clogging one of Baghdad's main thoroughfares. "Clear the road! Give me room. Please give me room," he pleaded.
Drivers barely took notice, in spite of the white ambulance's wailing siren and flashing lights. Karim's eyes searched for space, then he swerved through small openings between cars, finally arriving at the apartment building where a woman was having a heart attack.
Fortunately, the patient was still alive. Often, Karim and the two paramedics who ride with him aren't so lucky.
Traffic is just one of the worries that beset Baghdad's small coterie of ambulance crews. There are about 300 ambulances in this city of 6 million. Insurgents often want to kill the crews, American troops distrust them, and every run brings fear that at the end they'll find a trap.
Still, Karim, Ali Jassim Obeid, and Arkan Ali often make a dozen runs in a 24-hour shift in a desperate effort to save lives in one of the most violent cities on earth. They form a team that defies the rampant sectarianism that's claimed hundreds of victims in recent months and reaffirms the idea that even here there are everyday heroes.
Karim is a Sunni Muslim, Obeid is a Shiite Muslim, and Ali is a Kurd. Elsewhere in Iraq, they might be at one another's throats. But in the sterile ambulance, they depend on one another to survive the shift and stay safe.
They pick up the wounded from bombings by the Sunni-backed insurgency. They collect the dead from Shiite militia attacks. They talk about severed hands and heads.
Sometimes they have to retrieve one of their own.
They remember the run they made five months ago to recover a dead colleague on the airport road. He'd been shot at 2 a.m. by an American soldier as he rushed up and down the road looking for the meeting point described by the caller, they said.
"I've never felt so helpless," Ali said.
After recounting the tale, he climbed up the stairs of the apartment building and helped his colleagues load a large, breathless woman onto a stretcher. Back in the ambulance, Ali held onto a steel handrail installed in the roof as he kept an oxygen mask glued to the woman's face.
At Kadhimiya Hospital in north Baghdad, his eyes twinkled and he smiled.
"We saved a life," he said.
Often, it doesn't go so well. In April, they were called to a Sunni Baghdad neighborhood by a report that a woman was in labor. It was nighttime. As Karim pulled up, he saw men with rifles waiting. He swerved away. On the ambulance call log they wrote "failure."
Dr. Hashem Jabar, the head of ambulance services in northeast Baghdad, laments his men's low pay.
Drivers make $80.56 to $101.56 a month, and paramedics make $100 to $300. Police officers, by comparison, make $440 to $812 monthly.
Jabar's phone rang in the middle of his complaints.
An ambulance driver has been killed by Americans, he was told. A homemade bomb targeting a military convoy exploded on one side of the road. By chance, an ambulance carrying a sick child was rushing against traffic, trying to avoid the blocked road. A soldier fired a single shot. The driver died.
Ambulances have been rigged as bombs before, in Yousifiya, a Baghdad suburb in the Sunni triangle of death, and outside the Sunni city of Fallujah. Now, if ambulances speed near military checkpoints or convoys, they become targets.
Jabar struggles to prepare the ambulance teams for the violence. Ali and Obeid were military paramedics during the Saddam Hussein regime, but many others are untrained. Ten men are in training at an American military hospital. They will return to train others.
The ambulances "are just taxis right now," Jabar said. "They scoop and run and wait and see."
The crews are unprotected. Their ambulances aren't armored, and the men don't carry weapons or wear armored vests. Drivers are reimbursed for only half the gasoline they buy.
Many won't respond to some calls. After the midnight curfew, insurgent-infested neighborhoods such as Amariyah and Dora are simply too frightening.
Between calls, Ali, Obeid and Karim take naps on bunk beds in a small room of their station in central Baghdad. They drink sugary tea with their colleagues and make lunch in a small tiled kitchen. They watch action movies and belly dancers on a television attached to the wall to distract themselves from what they've seen on the streets.
When their next call comes in, they pray, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger" and hope faith is enough.
Of the horrors they've seen, Ali is stoic. "We just come back, wash our hands and eat lunch. We are ambulance men."
Fadel reports for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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