Dateline ACT

Iraq 1703

Photo essay: Iraq

Baghdad, May 9, 2003
Photos and text by Jonathan Frerichs (LWR-ACT)

Lively parish, place of refuge



St. Elya Chaldean Church in Baghdad was a refuge for 300 families during the war, a safe haven for parishioners plus neighbors of the church including some Muslims. Families slept in the church basement, halls and offices.

For three days after U.S. forces entered Baghdad, Abtisam Kamil, her husband and two children slept here in the St. Elya Chaldean Church basement among a crowd of families. "There were bombs near my house, airplanes overhead, soldiers and fedayeen fighters near our homes," Kamil said. "So we came here to be safe."



Three weeks after the fall of Baghdad a parish youth group has resumed its weekly gatherings in the same room, with team games, singing and fellowship.

Abtisam Kamil (white scarf), her friend Harbee Yosif and ten other women from St. Elya Chaldean Church have questioned 2,000 families for a survey of war injuries and damage in the parish neighborhood – both parishioners and neighbors in what is a poor area of Baghdad. The two discuss the data with Manuel Kamil, a parish official, and with a nun who worships at St. Elya.

The Chaldean Church is the largest church in Iraq and an eastern-rite Catholic Church. It is a member of the Middle East Council of Churches and active participant in the ACT-MECC parish shelter program.

A safe haven for 300 families during the worst nights of the war, St. Elya Chaldean Church is still a safe place to store medicines and emergency supplies. Two rooms hold pharmaceutical supplies for primary health clinics that are supported by the "All Our Children" campaign, a health initiative that includes some ACT members in the U.S.

When Baghdad was looted, parishioners and neighbors took up positions at the gate of St. Elya’s, protecting the church and the mosque next door with Kalashnikov rifles.

Targeted relief reaches a camp

Baghdad has five million people – all looking forward to a safer, more equitable and more prosperous future. But some are in greater need than others and one of the challenges of relief work right now is knowing who needs a specific kind of help. Doing something about it also requires groundwork and collaboration between international and local organizations.

Here, with the help of the two local NGOs, a new refugee camp in Baghdad receives bedding and personal hygiene kits from U.S. parishes related to ACT.

The residents are Palestinians forced from their homes by Iraqis resentful of the special treatment the Palestinians have received during a half-century of exile in Iraq. Like many other minorities in post-war Iraq their future is in question.

... A home for the aged

Other gifts from U.S. parishes go to the 130 residents of the Home for the Aged in the former Saddam City. Local NGO official Khalid Sudani, who has monitored needs and assisted the Home for years, hands out hygiene kits. A staff member helps one resident, who is blind, back to his room. When the excitement is over, it is time for lunch.




A mental hospital that was looted

In the chaos after the collapse of government authority in Baghdad symbols and institutions of the old regime attracted looting and vandalism, even the Al Rashad Mental Hospital. The 1,000-plus residents fled after advancing tanks breached the hospital compound’s walls and looters poured in. Some staff joined in stripping the place of anything of value, right down to the wiring in the walls.

In one corner of the hospital administration building a staff member working without electric light is putting decades of toppled records to shelves. The task seems almost pointless but as he works his way up the aisle he begins to make a rough order of the mess. It is as if his efforts recover the only dignity left for these files and the lives they represent. Meanwhile, 600 of the current residents are still scattered in the streets of Baghdad since the looting, the rapes and a fatal shooting that took place here two weeks earlier.

A young man seen among the looters a week earlier is back as a guard (second from right in photo above), Kalashnikov rifle in hand. Now he works for a new political party formed by a local cleric to assert control in the area. But security at Al Rashad Mental Hospital is still in doubt. New glass sent by the Red Cross to replace hospital windows lasted only two days before it too was gone.

… From a warehouse still intact

ACT relief items for the camp, the mental hospital and the home for the elderly were safe here from war and looting.



Across the alley, however, Sabah Shakir Elias surveys war damage to his business, the Al Sabah Plastics Factory. Anti-aircraft guns stationed in this warehouse district attracted aerial strafing and bombing he said. Then looters took machinery, cash and records from his property.



Next door to the relief warehouse, bullet holes in the roof of another factory take on the appearance of a planetarium.

Frontline health care

The Iraqis most vulnerable after the war are those who were most vulnerable before it. Their struggle was largely ignored by the old regime and by the wider international community during a decade of sanctions and the recent political crisis and war. In a sense the mothers and children involved are fighting their own war, against chronic disease and malnutrition, and it has not ended.

At clinics in high-risk neighborhoods, one child with a minor ailment goes home after a short examination. Others, limp in their mother’s arms, have chronic diarrhea, the disease that takes the lives of many Iraqi children.



One-year-old Musa Sabbah, has a respiratory infection that is also a major killer of children in Iraq. Treatment is not difficult, but it must be available where it is needed and children need better nutrition than many of them received from the Oil For Food government/U.N. ration system – big problems in the past that must be resolved now.



With the fall of the former regime, access to marginalized neighborhoods has improved for NGOs where agreement and support is secured from the new, local authorities – usually clerics. New or improved neighborhood clinics are one positive step, but better public health in such places also requires better water treatment and sanitation.

(Clinics shown in the photos above are supported by ACT member agencies Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief as part of a people-to-people health initiative by eight, mostly faith-based NGOs in the U.S. called "All Our Children.")

A ward without medicine

A damaged ambulance is a reminder of the looting at Mansour Hospital in Baghdad.

A woman seeking help for her daughter waits beside an emergency water system installed for the hospital on the banks of the Tigris River by ACT member Norwegian Church Aid. She thinks that radiation from depleted uranium munitions used in the last Gulf War caused her daughter’s condition.

The Mansour Hospital leukemia ward is a reminder of gaps in the improving medical system. There are only three patients here because leukemia medicine is not available. Maksoud Muhsen, 5, Baha Hashe, three months, and a mother and son wait patiently nevertheless. Here and at three other pediatrics hospitals, "All Our Children" a U.S. NGO initiative that includes ACT members, helped with repairs during the war and is helping supply food now.


Maksoud Muhsen, 5


Baha Hashe, three months

Back from the street

The Dar El Rachma Center for Street Children is another project supported by two ACT members as part of a special U.S. non-governmental initiative for Iraqi children. Before the war 120 children and youth here received food, shelter, education, and individual, social and vocational training and assistance. But their guards were harsh and sometimes abusive.

When Baghdad fell, U.S. soldiers thought the institution was a detention center and threw open the gates. Looting ensued, assisted by some members of the staff, and all the children fled. Three weeks after the war about 40 had returned or been found. They are scared the old staff might come back. A local cleric has now taken responsibility for the institution. Dar El Rachma is in the populous Shiite quarter of Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City.

Baghdad scenes

Live shots for TV network news originate from the roof of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, and attract demonstrations in the square below.

The remains of the Saddam Hussein statue toppled in Paradise Square in front of the Palestine Hotel cameras. Graffiti on the pedestal says "All Donne. Go Home."

Tanks and razor wire surrounded three hotels where most foreigners stayed for three weeks after the fall of Baghdad.

Looted, burned and sometimes bombed government ministries dot the city of Baghdad. Here, the Ministry of Trade.

Loot is for sale in special markets. Here a truckload of heavy artillery shells was being unloaded at a private residence. The looters did not wish to be photographed.

Tigris River and Baghdad -- The Tigris has sustained Baghdad throughout its long history but now after years of national crisis and this ancient river receives half a million tons of raw sewage each day. While still sustaining much of Iraq’s population the unclean water of the Tigris and Euphrates poses a major threat to public health and a major challenge to all new authorities in the country now.