National Post (National Edition)
Iraq at war: Canadians saving jihadi fighters
‘WE TREAT ANYBODY WHO COMES THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR,’ SAYS FRONT-LINE DOCTOR
ERBIL, IRAQ • Canadian doctors who have honed their skills from the battlefields of Afghanistan to the killing fields of Iraq, are now using them to save the lives of enemy jihadists.
“We treat anybody who comes through the front door,” said Lt.-Col. Richard Morin, a physician who oversees Canada’s Role 2 Hospital at Erbil Airport, 80 kilometres east of the front lines at Mosul.
“That means all coalition forces, Iraqi security forces, civilians and Daesh,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. “Some enemy combatants have come through.”
Iraqi government forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been involved in a months-long battle to retake the city of Mosul, captured by ISIL in June 2014.
The hospital in the Kurdish capital has two surgical suites and provides medical care for trauma patients who have suffered catastrophic injuries on the battlefield.
Because of “lessons learned” in Afghanistan, Canadian medical personnel were used to dealing with “multiple gunshot wounds and explosions,” said Morin, who also served in Kandahar.
“A lot of Afghanistan is still something that is in our heads. That was the pinnacle of our careers,” said a surgeon who served three tours for Canada in Kandahar and one tour in Kabul.
“This kind of work is what makes a career interesting. You can only do so many gall bladders.”
One of the appeals of battlefield medicine was that “keeping alive a 20-year-old who wants to live is easier than treating an 89-year-old who is trying to die,” the colonel said.
“I love this job; I have never been more fulfilled than when I am taking care of our soldiers. The young core is dedicated and driven. We are an effective extension of Canadian values and on top of that we do damn good medicine.”
“We get trauma patients with injuries not typically seen in Canada,” said an operating room nurse who served two tours in Afghanistan. “We saw more blast injuries in Afghanistan but the medicine and the population are very similar. We are very focused in our approach to trauma medicine.”
One of the differences with Afghanistan was that in Iraq the physicians also had “to be aware of chemical warfare — the possible use of mustard gas and chlorine gas, “said the surgeon. “We are being told by forward teams that the enemy is far more cruel than in Afghanistan.”
But the cruelty of the jihadists — ISIL has circulated videos showing prisoners being beheaded, shot in the back of the head, drowned or burned alive — does not mean they are denied treatment if they arrive at the hospital.
The Canadian Armed Forces “respects and abides by the Geneva Conventions, the Hippocratic Oath and basic human decency of morals and ethics to treat another human who is in medical distress. This means that the CAF would not deny medical support to any casualty requiring treatment,” said Maj. Paul Doucette, spokesman for Task ForceIraq.
As of January 4, Canada’s hospital, which opened six weeks ago, had treated 120 patients, according to statistics provided by Task ForceIraq. Seven of those patients were Canadian soldiers. Seventeen of them were Iraqi civilians and three were listed as “other,” which is how enemy combatants who have been detained are described. The bulk of those treated have been American and other western advisers and Iraqi and Kurdish troops who are collectively described as “coalition forces.”
The coalition had captured the ISIL fighters, Doucette said. However, exactly which coalition forces had detained the wounded prisoners and who has responsible for the chain of custody before during and after the prisoners received medical care in the Canadian hospital was not clear.
“They are in the custody of coalition forces,” Doucette said, without elaborating.
The Canadian medical team, which numbers about 50 people, includes an orthopedic surgeon, a general surgeon, an anesthesiologist and two emergency medicine specialists as well as surgical nurses. A Norwegian military surgical team also uses the Canadian facility which can care for as many as 8 patients at a time.
“We do damage control, we resuscitate and we do surgery. We keep them alive,” Morin said. After receiving emergency care patients are moved within 48 to 72 hours to other hospitals for additional surgeries or to recuperate.
The government has announced that the Canadian hospital in Erbil is a fixed duration mission of six to 12 months, Lt. Col. Morin, said.