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Hospitals Coping in Battered Basra

Posted on: Sunday, 30 March 2003, 06:00 CST

By CHARLES J. HANLEY

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Hospitals in bombed and besieged Basra are coping so far with a flood of war casualties, but a lengthy, bloody standoff could deplete supplies of anesthetics, antibiotics and other essentials, the U.N. medical chief for Iraq said Saturday.

Dr. Ghulam R. Popal said he was concerned, too, about thousands of chronically ill patients - suffering from diabetes, hypertension and other conditions - who may be stranded, kept from regular treatments by the shelling and bombing of the southern Iraqi city by British and U.S. forces.

For the past week, British ground units have tightened a cordon around Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, in order to pressure its paramilitary and regular army defenders to surrender.

A U.S. Central Command spokesman, Air Force Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart, said Saturday that British forces had secured the Basra refinery, and had moved into place so that they could prevent regular Iraqi army troops north of the city from entering it to reinforce units still loyal to Saddam Hussein.

And striking before dawn, British tanks and infantry staged a lightning raid into Basra on Saturday, destroying five Iraqi tanks and blowing up two statues of Saddam Hussein before withdrawing.

Late Friday, U.S. warplanes using laser-guided missiles destroyed a two-story building in Basra where some 200 Iraqi paramilitary fighters were said to be meeting, the U.S. military said.

In Baghdad on Saturday, Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, said an air strike had destroyed a Basra warehouse holding thousands of tons of food for the city. It could not be determined whether this was the same building; neither account could be independently confirmed.

Journalists at the scene report regular artillery duels between Iraqi defenders and the British 7th Armored Brigade outside Basra, and say columns of smoke hang over the city of 1.3 million people, amid marshlands 60 miles northwest of the head of the Persian Gulf.

"The health infrastructure in Basra is functioning, with a very high level of injured," said Popal, World Health Organization representative to Iraq. He was evacuated March 18 from Baghdad.

"If the number of injured grows and the war continues much longer, shortages could grow critical, of such things as anesthetics, antibiotics and surgical materials," Popal told The Associated Press, speaking of both Basra and Baghdad.

While medical staffs tended the wounded in Basra hospitals, an International Committee of the Red Cross technical team was struggling to repair three of six generators needed to get the city's main water treatment plant fully operating, more than a week after city power was knocked out by U.S.-British bombing.

The three other generators were started up Thursday, restoring access to safe water for half the city. The other half of the population is largely drawing water directly from the brackish, sewage-polluted Shatt al-Arab estuary. Health officials fear this could produce epidemics of typhoid or cholera.

Just as troubling, said Muin Kassis of the Red Cross in Amman, are towns and villages lying to the south of Basra, such as Zubayr, Safwan and Jabjud. "They have been without electricity and water since a week ago Friday," he said. "We're concerned."

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