“I GET used to mutilation: it’s like lunch and supper for us — something you get twice a day,” says Ismail Fadhil, blank-faced, stubbing out another cigarette butt. “It is usual to load up body parts, half bodies. Once, in Al-Amel, most of the victims were kids and they were in bits.”

Working 24-hour, day-on day-off shifts, Ismail, 39, drives an ambulance for Yarmouk Hospital, and is usually scrambled to emergencies alone, without even a radio. His decrepit Saddam-era ambulance, pocked with bullet holes, has not so much as a bandage: the hospital’s equipment, looted in 2003, has yet to be replaced.

“I’ve got no first-aid measures at all,” says Ismail. “It’s like driving a cab. The best I can do if I find a guy with his guts hanging out is stuff them back in and shove him into the vehicle.”

When his work is done he slops the blood out with a bucket of water. “We haven’t even got disinfectant. It is like cleaning out a garage.”

For every sick person, Ismail collects ten victims of violence. He has been shot at by insurgents, US soldiers, Iraqi police and national guards. At the scene of one suicide bomb attack last year he saw ambulance crews hit by a second bomber.

A police patrol drives into Yarmouk’s forecourt as patients’ relatives take a break in the morning sun. In the back of a truck is the body of a middle-aged man. He has been bound and gagged, and shot in the face and chest. On his vest is a message, scrawled in turquoise felt-tip: “This is Hamid, collaborator, traitor, American spy”.

The crowd look on uninterestedly as the police unload the body, seen dumped that morning from a BMW near the airport road.

As well as shooting at him, Ismail says, the security forces sometimes attack him if he fails to save the lives of their casualties. “The National Guard are the worst,” he said. “I went to a place where there was a shoot-out and the guard gave me one of their guys to take. The guy was already dead. I got to the hospital and when they realised their man was a goner they beat me and a doctor and tried to smash up my vehicle.”

Hospital officials are noticing a new trend. “We are seeing more targeting of security men, government officials and those affiliated to political parties, as well as sectarian killings,” says Ihsan Nasser, 31, the statistician on Yarmouk’s emergency ward. “Last year assassinations and drive-by shootings were rarer than bomb attacks, but now we are now recording more assassinations than bomb attacks.”

Many bodies are taken directly to the central mortuary without ever arriving at Yarmouk.

Between September last year and June, 1,763 wounded were treated at Yarmouk. Since June, 886 wounded have arrived. These figures relate only to terrorist attacks and coalition fire. “They don’t include violent crime,” says Ismail.

In the ward a woman with 100 per cent burns has died. Staff suspect she was set on fire as part of a family dispute. “If we registered the crime casualties we would have endless files and four times the number.”

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