View of the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) field trauma clinic with an emergency room, operating theater, intensive care unit and in patient department. The facility was opened on the 16th February in a village south of Mosul. For more than one month it has been the closest surgical facility to West Mosul. Picture taken on 02 April, 2017 by MSF/Alice Martins. Used with permission.Not long ago, I was dispatched by the medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to an MSF-run field trauma hospital in Hammam al-Alil, which, for a brief while, was the closest surgical facility to West Mosul.
The trauma hospital is an exceptional project. About two months into its opening, 2067 patients have been received at the hospital; 55 percent of them were women and children and 82 percent had war wounds. To date, more than 160 major surgeries were performed by Iraqi and international staff at the facility. These facts alone should remind us that the massive cost of war – particularly in counter-terrorism conflicts where both sides tend towards a ‘total war’ approach – is often paid by people, young or old, caught in the crossfire, mortars, and airstrikes.
I was sent to gather stories of Iraqi patients and the Iraqi medical and non-medical staff in the trauma hospital. Reflecting on what I heard (too many to count) and wrote down (a sliver of what I heard), and rereading the outcome before you, I am compelled to write a few additional words here as a quasi-foreword:
