APRIL AND IRAQ PEACE TEAM

Dr. April Hurley of Santa Rosa visits a Baghdad hospital, interviewing victims whose house collapsed during a bombing raid, killing five and injuring six people. Photo by Kael Alford for the Chronicle		April with friends -- Santa Rosa, August 2002  (before joining the Iraq Peace Team on March 05, 2003) Photo by Andrea A. Abbott, IPT Support Member
"The country [Iraq] is impoverished, 60% on UN food for oil, much of the exchange absorbed by the UN for other expenses. What a forgiving people! Amazingly accepting and warm toward me, an American. They don’t understand why we attack them for oil and I can’t help them there! I feel responsible for all the devastation that I allowed without civil disobedience sooner. I’m sorry for the risks that I didn’t take before. How could it come to this?" -April's journal 03/03.

Santa Rosa Doctor Documents Casualties

Woman sees firsthand effect of war on Iraqis
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 1, 2003

Baghdad -- The Kaiser style seems to work pretty well with the victims of bombs and missiles in Iraq -- at least for moral support.

Dr. April Hurley, a family doctor for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, is spending much of her days and nights in the hospitals of Baghdad, where bleeding patients are cared for by harried Iraqi doctors and crowds of nervous relatives.

Hurley's no-nonsense, just-the-facts manner, which would be familiar to countless Kaiser patients in Northern California, seems a bit bewildering to Sulav Jasem as the Iraqi woman explains the case of her 6-year-old daughter, Adara. The girl was severely burned on the face and back early Tuesday morning when their house collapsed during what they say was a U.S. missile and bomb attack on the western outskirts of Baghdad.

"What happened then?" Hurley asks. "Where did you find her? What position was she in?"

Jasem, cloaked in the black hijab shawl of conservative Muslim women, patiently fields Dr. Hurley's nonstop questions as a crowd of family members hovers over Adara's hospital bed.

According to Jasem and others, a bomb hit their in-laws' house about 4:30 a. m. Of the 11 people who were spending the night there -- several families who were huddling together for safety and solace amid the nightly bomb raids -- six were injured and five were killed. When frantic relatives clawed away the rubble, they found little Adara pinned under a smoldering sofa.

As Dr. Hurley quizzes Jasem, the hospital room shudders with the dull thudding of U.S. missile and bomb impacts nearby. There is, of course, a real war outside, a huge power play between the world's superpower and a regime with few friends abroad. But Dr. Hurley is one of several hundred foreign activists, including a few dozen Americans, who have gathered in Baghdad to show their opposition to the war.

Unlike most of the activists, who spend their time as "human shields" guarding power stations and other possible bomb targets, Dr. Hurley goes from hospital to hospital, interviewing bombing victims and jotting down details in a white notebook.

She leans over Reem -- Jasem's sister-in-law, who is lying in a coma in a nearby bed -- and listens to the sounds emanating from the breathing tube. "Aargh, hunh hunh hunh," comes the rumbling moan.

"Her breathing is very fast, but her sounds are good. Her sounds are really good," she tells Jasem through a translator.

Hurley has been in Iraq since March 13 and plans to stay "for the duration, " she says. She spends her days on a quixotic mission to help heal Iraqis through activism rather than traditional medicine. Iraqi doctors and hospital administrators have welcomed her, although they have kept her at arm's length.

"Iraq has lots of doctors, so unless there's major bloodshed in the streets, I probably won't practice" medicine, Hurley says."There's not that much you can do when you're working as a doctor, because you're so busy and your time is so limited." Instead, Hurley hopes she can "get the story out" by e-mailing situation reports home, to be re-distributed.

She doesn't worry much about what will happen after the war. "I think most of my private practice patients will wait for me," she says, "and I hope Kaiser will take me back."

She worries more about the long-term psychological damage that the U.S. "shock and awe" campaign is producing among Iraqi youth.

"I'm hearing about a lot of kids with irritability, sleeplessness, shaking, " she says. "You can imagine what it's like being a kid, with the explosions we got last night."

"A few days ago," she says, "I saw a man with multiple injuries who jumped up on a bed, yelling 'Don't touch me, I'll kill you! I want to fight the Americans!' He had lost his brain."

Sometimes she encounters frustrations. On Tuesday night, for example, she spent about a half-hour trying to persuade the director of Jasem's hospital, Hussein Ali, to accept a truckload of medicine coming in next week. Very politely, Ali refused.

Like most Iraqi doctors, Ali speaks passable English, but he misinterpreted Hurley's comments and thought she was suggesting that he accept a cargo truck of U.S. material.

"We don't want occupation things," said Ali. "Thank you very much."

Hurley finally resorted to handing out a large bag of colored pens and watercolor paints that she had brought with her.

The parents of the young children in the ward seemed grateful. They grabbed the gifts and set them aside. Then they went back to their tearful vigils beside their relatives.