Sadr Hospital Airstrike and Health Care Networks
By Chris Albon, May 7th, 2008,
At approximately 10:00am on May 3rd, the United States fired three precision-guided weapons at a small building next to Sadr General Hospital in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad. The building is alleged by coalition forces to be a “criminal element command and control center“. The first munition struck the small building, the second struck the hospital’s ambulance parking lot and broke the hospital’s water line, and the third hit a generator used by the neighborhood but not the hospital.
McClatchy’s Leila Fadel and Shashank Bengali described the damage:
Sadr Hospital, one of two main hospitals serving the massive Shiite Muslim slum, is operating on a backup water supply that wasn’t expected to last longer than 48 hours. On Sunday afternoon, a main street outside the hospital was flooded as workmen tried to repair a series of underground pipes that ruptured when the missiles targeted what U.S. military officials described as a militia outpost a few yards from the hospital.
“If there are no more attacks, we might be able to fix it. We don’t know,” said a hospital security official who gave his name as Abu Sajjad. “Otherwise, in two days we will run out of water and the hospital can’t go on.”
The official said that the U.S. strike also damaged 15 ambulances and forced many hospital staff to flee. Not everyone returned to work Sunday, leaving a Spartan emergency ward nearly empty of doctors.
The airstrike betrays an understandable ignorance in coalition forces towards the nature of health care delivery. While coalition forces avoid targeting hospitals directly, this does not protect the ability of the hospital to function. The rational for not striking hospitals is to keep them operating and providing health to the local population. However, any hospital’s functions are reliant on a large network of facilities and services. This network includes ambulance facilities and water lines. Most of these network nodes exist outside the hospital’s physical perimeter and whose presence is not calculated into airstrike planning. If policy makers truly want to maintain access to healthcare during armed conflict they must consider not only the hospital’s physical facilities but also key nodes in the area’s health care network, regardless of whether or not they fly the red cross.
Chris is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses explores the relationship between armed conflict and public health. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Jen. Read more about him at his website.
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June 21st, 2008 at 6:15 pm
What Sadrist propaganda. Any well-informed person knows that the Sadrists used their previous control of the Ministry of Health to subvert the Iraqi Health Care System.
Sunnis that were hurt during the days of sectarian violence were too terrified to go to Sadrist infiltrated hospitals.
The building next to the Al Sadr General Hospital was a Sadrist military command post and the bombing killed a top level Mahdi Army militant, Arkan Hasnawi. The militant was responsible for kidnapping civilians and was directing military operations from the building hit in the airstrike.
Later in the month the following weapons were seized inside the hospital itself…
“…more than 100 RPG rounds, rocket sleds, more than 60 home-made grenades, more than 50 fuses, TNT with cortex, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and several mortar tubes corresponding to multiple mortar sizes.”