Rov in g Repor ter
“The Land Rover is the only ambulance that can make it to front lines to pick up the injured”
When a grey dawn, reminiscent of English weather at its finest, breaks over Mosul, a handful of Iraqi soldiers from units battling the Islamic State (IS) motor into the unremarkable nearby town of Hamam Al-alil to stock up on bread for breakfast. Cruising into the same town from the opposite direction for a tea stop, I spot a nice khaki-coloured Land Rover ambulance, with a big red crescent – the Muslim version of the Red Cross – emblazoned across its side. “Stop, stop!” I tell my driver. There is no way I am missing out on another chance to check out a military Land Rover contributing to the war effort in Mosul.
Milling around outside a bakery, waiting for the next batch of freshly-baked bread to be ready, we find its driver and co-pilot, who are from the 9th Division of the Iraqi Army, one of the many Iraqi forces battling to liberate Iraq’s second largest city from its almost three-year occupation by IS. They seem delighted to while away the minutes by singing the praises of the Land Rover which they think, looking a bit perplexed by the question, dates back to around 2002.
“This is a great vehicle and, for us right now, it is the best vehicle in the world,” enthuses Abbas, 32. “We’ve got other ambulances but none of the others are as strong as this one. Other 4x4s just get destroyed doing this job but this one has amazing endurance.”
The weather in Iraq is surprisingly extreme, with harsh winters, a springtime that seems to feature similar quantities of miserable driving rain as a typical English April, and which will I’m told suddenly and dramatically turn into a searing hot summer.
Iraq’s barren landscape is ill-suited to the spring rains and, within a few hours, its stretches of dusty desert are transformed into mud baths of an unbelievably adhesive and wheel-clogging clay-like substance. In the current rainy season, the Land Rover is usually the only ambulance that can make it to any rural front lines to pick up the injured.
“None of our other ambulances are as strong as this one. This Land Rover can go where other ambulances cannot,” says Abbas, proudly. I can well believe it. On some of the wettest days here, I’ve seen barefooted children fleeing fighting being literally pulled shoeless out of the mud by soldiers, and Humvees stuck in mud trying to rescue other stuck Humvees using, in the absence of proper tow ropes, literally any alternative to hand.
“It’s a good car, but it does have one weakness, which is that in wet weather it’s easy to roll if you turn too quickly,” says the Land Rover’s co-pilot, Kamal, 32. “We’ve rolled this one several times.” He points to a gaping hole once fitted with glass in the rear, cheerfully explaining: “That’s why there are no windows left!” Iraqis tend to follow what I term the Libyan school of driving – reckless but enthusiastic – and transporting critically-injured patients to the nearest field hospital adds urgency. Kamal says they have rolled the ambulance several times when carrying patients away from the front lines and one can only imagine how awful that experience was for the stretcher-cases inside.
A glance into the back through the missing window shows it is brutally basic. It is fitted with two stretchers, has one blanket and zero medical supplies or equipment. The ambulances serving Mosul’s front lines are only used for transportation, once chronic bleeding has been stemmed and other injuries patched up, normally with copious bandages. Between two empty cabinets at the far end, an incongruous sign harking back to the Land Rover’s early years reads, in English: “Attention: Oxygen content. No smoking.” There are no oxygen canisters to be seen and doubtless plenty of smoking.
A couple of Osama AK47S lie on the stretchers. A slightly smaller version of the original Kalashnikov, across the Arab world this type of AK47 is so-called because in pretty much all footage and photos of Osama Bin Laden one of these weapons was inevitably close at hand.
This Land Rover ambulance has been driving wounded from the front lines against IS through all seasons since mid2014 but Abbas and Kamal have also driven it in an assortment of civil conflicts in war-torn Iraq since 2009. In occasional downtime, they say their main focus is keeping the Land Rover ready for the next outbreak of fighting or declaration of war. “Whenever we have a break, we clean it, service it and make it good again,” says Abbas. “That’s always a priority.”
The baker declares their bread is ready. Throwing a bulging carrier bag full of delicious flat Iraqi bread into the cab, Abbas and Kamal pose for a few photos before climbing into the cab. Starting the engine with a typical puff of exhaust fumes, Abbas shouts out the window: “What we really need in here is a stereo!”