By Aquila-Style - Modern Muslim Living
Camille Bouissou AFP
Milad was an operating theatre nurse in Qaraqosh before ISIS fighters seized Iraq’s largest Christian town. Now he compiles long lists of medicines that his fellow displaced Iraqis sorely lack.
He fled the turmoil in the territory north of Baghdad seized by
ISIS since June to take refuge in Iraqi Kurdish territory further north.
After having abandoned all but the bare essentials in the face of the
ISIS advance, many of the displaced in the Kurdish regional capital of
Arbil have set up camp in public gardens, in schools and outside
churches.
The United Nations says an estimated 1.8 million Iraqis have been displaced by violence in the country this year.
In their dash to escape the brutality of the extremists, few had time
to gather medical files or prescriptions essential to treating their
ailments.
So since his own arrival in Arbil on August 8, Milad spends a good
part of each morning touring an assortment of makeshift camps to assess
medical needs and shortages.
Children and old people are constantly brought forward with their
needs for medication — in scant supply despite countries such as France
and Austria having flown in consignments.
Aid organisations have been able to draw up lists and evaluate needs
in the large refugee camps that have sprouted up across Iraqi Kurdistan.
Milad homes in on the smaller camps, which can still house as many as 300 displaced people.
He fills sheets of paper with a catalogue of medical complaints: a
child with heart problems, another whose parents say has a brain “that’s
not working properly”, a blind man … the list goes on and on.
At the end of his tours, Milad delivers the information he has
gathered to Dr Laith Hababa, who visits the next day with whatever
medicine he can muster up.
Hababa, a fellow Qaraqosh native, also puts in shifts as a volunteer
doctor in the afternoons at the Habib Malh Health Centre in Arbil,
having been granted permission to use the facility after its operating
hours.
Word spread fast of his cost-free consultations, and he and a small
team of other volunteers now see between 400 and 600 patients a day.
“The big challenge is to get hold of medication,” said Hababa.
Left everything behind
During Milad’s tour through a hall used in normal times for wedding
receptions, several women came forward clutching half-empty packets of
pills in their hands and asking for refills.
“When we fled (Qaraqosh) we left everything behind: the examinations,
the X-rays… We just took some medicine,” said the grandmother of Sada, a
three-year-old girl with a brain disease.
The small child, who is not able to walk, was stretched out in the heat on a mattress on the ground.
Nearby, 46-year-old Sana said she suffers from elephantiasis and showed the documentation to prove it.
Milad took note and tore off another sheet of paper, adding it to a compendium of conditions and requests for medication.
The situation is precarious in the large camps.
“And we are coming up to winter… Everybody will have health issues,”
said Valley Edwar, who runs the clinic of St Joseph’s church in Ankawa, a
suburb of Arbil.
Edwar said the proximity in which camp dwellers are obliged to live encourages the spread of skin diseases and other sicknesses.
“Fortunately, for now there’s no epidemic,” said Dr Saman Hussein
Barzanghy, director general of health services in Arbil province.
But another doctor, Saleh Dabbakeh of the Red Cross, cautioned: “The
seasons change and health problems start, especially as these people are
living in groups.”