By Kathy Kelly

In 1996 Dr. Raad Towalha gave up his career as a surgeon to become director of Ibn Sina hospital in Mosul. Looking at his handsome and dignified figure, I quickly jot “could double for Omar Sharif” in my notepad. Like its director, Ibn Sina looks pretty good. Walking into the Cardiac Care Unit, I was surprised to see at least some machinery hooked up and blinking.

Then the litany: there are 14 beds in the unit, but only two monitors and there is no central control station. Who gets the two monitors? “I have no other choice,” says Dr. Hamid Zacharia, the chief resident on the CCU. “I choose the most critical.” In the event of an emergency, they make a change-it sounds like a bizarre game of musical chairs-remove the monitor from the patient formerly deemed most critical and hook it up to serve the newly arrived patient.

By Ramzi Kysia

Baghdad does not know it’s a city under a death sentence.
The sun still shines here. The date palms and poplars still line the Tigris River. The streets are still full of cars, and buses, and taxicabs searching for fares. When night falls, the mosques are full of people praying, and the sidewalks jam with families enjoying the festive Ramadan atmosphere of street vendors, sweets dealers, and restaurateurs roasting chickens in the open air. And with smuggling at an all time high, the shops are full of pretty things to look at - even if most people still can’t afford to buy them.

Walking the streets of Baghdad you notice the architecture - the boarded-up buildings, the crumbling sidewalks. This is what happens after 11 years of economic ruin. But then you also notice the new, box-like structures being built, with huge archways, intricate brickwork, and jutting columns, balconies, and facades. It’s a striking mix of old and new, of socialist sensibility and Babylonian splendor - Frank Lloyd Wright meets Lawrence of Arabia. These buildings are beautiful, and you have to wonder how many of them will be standing in six months if the U.S. does decide to massively bomb this country.