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SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Asked when
he last had to treat victims of a car bomb, Iraqi
doctor Arif Anwar, an emergency room surgeon at
Sulaimaniya's main hospital, dismisses the question
with a smile and then starts to laugh.
"Car bomb? Are you joking?" he chuckles, as his
white-coated colleagues in the doctors' lounge join
the chorus of amusement.
"We don't have anything like that. The biggest
problem we have here is car accidents -- too many
car accidents," he says, shaking his head in dismay
at the poor quality of local driving.
It is perhaps the starkest reflection of the huge
contrast between the secure Kurdish region of
northern Iraq, and most of the rest of the country,
racked daily by insurgent violence.
The emergency room at Anwar's hospital, a newly
built wing that wouldn't look out of place in
Europe, sometimes doesn't handle a single emergency
all day. On other days maybe 10 to 15 patients are
brought in, the doctors say.
"Maybe someone fell off a ladder, or had an accident
with machinery," says Anwar. "Sometimes there are
domestic fights, and old people collapse in the
heat, but that is it."
The pristine 500-bed hospital has advanced equipment
like CT and MRI scanners, a well-stocked pharmacy
and an outpatient clinic, facilities unknown to
hospitals in Baghdad.
Yarmouk, one of the capital's busiest hospitals,
sometimes handles 100 victims of suicide car bombs a
day, runs out of anaesthetic regularly, has a
bare-bones pharmacy and often no sheets on the beds.
Women wash blood from the floors.
"Here we are a normal city and this is a normal
hospital, we are happy doctors," says Anwar, who
trained in Baghdad and spent six years working at
the vast Medical City complex there. "I think
doctors in Baghdad must be losing their minds. I
will never go back," he says.
FOLLOWING THE LAW
The gulf between security in most of Iraq and the
Kurdish north shows up not only in the experience of
the doctors, but also in daily life. Every evening
the streets of Sulaimaniya, a thriving city of
around 700,000 people, are thronged.
Young men and women walk or sit together in the
parks, while older men gather in cafes to drink tea
and play backgammon. Restaurants are packed, music
plays and the streets are alive -- in stark contrast
to Baghdad and other troubled cities.
In Baghdad, the streets are crammed with 14-foot
(3.5 metre) concrete walls designed to protect
against bomb blasts, and many of them are blackened
or pock-marked from shrapnel.
In Sulaimaniya there are no blast walls at all,
except a ring of two-metre walls round the main
hotel. In Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region,
such blast walls as do exist are painted with bright
murals of flowers, waterfalls and gardens.
In the north, either there are traffic lights or
smartly dressed police direct obedient traffic with
glow sticks. In Baghdad, the roads are chaotic and
the harassed, crumpled traffic police are abused
from dawn to dusk.
A small boy who jumped through railings to dash
across a main road in Sulaimaniya was whistled at by
police, forced to walk back and made to cross at the
appropriate spot. Cars parked in the wrong place are
given $20 tickets -- and owners pay up.
In Baghdad, residents get only three or four hours
of electricity a day, in Sulaimaniya they regularly
get 20. The different way of life and mentality make
some Kurds believe Kurdistan, as they call it,
should be a separate country. Others, in Sulaimaniya
at least, argue their region is an integral part of
Iraq, and should support it as best it can.
Until that debate comes to a head, Kurds are
determined to make the most of their relative good
fortune.
"We are lucky here, it is true," said Anwar. "Here,
my wife and family are happy. I cannot imagine
living in Baghdad now." (IRAQ-SULAIMANIYA; editing
by Tim Pearce))
Reuters
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