Times Online Article: Short tragic life of an Iraqi baby

Asma Ibrahim tells Hala Jaber of her tormented experience giving birth amid Baghdad's anarchy



WHEN I realised I was pregnant within a month of being married last June, I could barely contain my joy. I’m an ordinary young Iraqi woman, aged 26, with commonplace dreams of building a home and family. It seemed last summer that even in Baghdad, such dreams could come true.


My wedding had been different to most in the world. I wore a simple white dress and the closest members of my family came, but no friends. Strangest of all, my husband-to-be Samouel al-Rawi could not be there.


Samouel, who’s 30, was in hiding after receiving a death threat a few days earlier. He worked for a Canadian cargo company transporting goods for the US military, and some Sunni extremists told him that unless he supplied the names of employees and dates of cargoes being moved out of the airport he’d be killed. So hejust stayed in the airport, day and night, for safety.


Luckily the groom doesn’t have to be present at a Muslim wedding so we went ahead without him. But we didn’t feel like celebrating. It’s hard to celebrate in a city where people are afraid of showing happiness for fear of hurting the feelings of others or arousing the suspicions of those who want Iraqis to live in sorrow and darkness.


Finding out that I was pregnant made me forget the lonely weekday nights of waiting to see Samouel at weekends. Suddenly we were making plans and counting the days until our baby was born, determined to give him the most stable life a family can provide in a time of war.


Even so, mundane details that would be taken for granted elsewhere became big issues for us. How would I find a good doctor when most have fled or been driven out? Which hospital would I go to when most have become hunting grounds for militias? How would I cope with the birth without my baby’s father at my side?


I tried to concentrate on the happiness each month’s appointment with the doctor would bring. Hearing the baby’s heartbeat transported me away from the daily bombings to a seemingly brighter future.


Given the relentless pressures, it is perhaps not surprising that I started having small contractions in my seventh month of pregnancy. But I never imagined I would have to give birth like an animal in the forest.


It was eight weeks ago, the night of December 12, and I was alone in my bed when the serious contractions started. I rang my mother and my parents-in-law, who lived nearby, but although they were there in five minutes flat there wasn’t much they could do.


There was a curfew so they couldn’t take me to hospital. They called for an ambulance but were told it wasn’t safe to come to to our district, Amiriya. The police response was the same: “Sorry, we cannot come to your area.”


My brother walked to an Iraqi military checkpoint 10 minutes away, but the soldiers fired warning shots at him.


For two hours I screamed with the pain as my family sobbed with me. I was bleeding heavily by the time I felt my tiny baby slipping out of me. Suddenly there he was, lying on the sitting room floor at the end of the umbilical cord. He was blue and still.


“Please do something, pleasehelp him,” I cried. “I want him to grow up with me.”


My mother and mother-in-law didn’t even go to him. He looked stillborn to them so they concentrated on trying to stop me bleeding to death.


It was only now that someone remembered a surgeon who lived one block away. When he arrived at 4am to shrieks of Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) the couch and carpets were drenched in blood and my son was still on the floor. The surgeon, who’d brought some basic instruments, immediately set about trying to staunch the flow of my blood.


But while everyone else’s attention was focused on me, I kept staring at my son, willing him to live. And then a miracle happened. He seemed to choke for a moment and started crying out loud.


“Oh God, he’s still alive,” I shouted as all eyes turned to the child. “Please save him.”


Still attached to me, he was wrapped in a blanket and at 5am the surgeon decided to drive us through the checkpoints to the hospital in Yarmouk, a Sunni district 20 minutes up the road.


I thought the hospital would be a safe haven for Sunnis like us. Imagine my horror when we were greeted at the entrance by Shi’ite gunmen.


They waved us through but I knew we wouldn’t be able to stay for long.


The umbilical cord was severed at last and my son was placed in an incubator. I looked at him and in my exhaustion I believed for a moment that he was smiling at me and all my anguish faded away.


I had to leave him there. They said it wasn’t a safe place for Sunnis. The nurse gave me a mobile number to call so that I could check my boy was all right. But when I rang the following night he was suffering from jaundice.


I had to see him, however briefly. I went in the morning and found him in a terrible state, struggling to breathe and with little blue bruises all over his body. His blanket, nappy and a bag of clothes we’d brought were missing.


Later, when I rang the nurse to complain, she slammed the phone down on me. But there was another call that evening — the call to tell me my son, Ahmed, had died.


The pain that gripped my heart that night may never go away. I had to phone my husband and he was practical, though I know he must have felt the same. He arranged for a good Shi’ite friend of his to collect our son’s body for us.


The friend found him in the hospital morgue. Our boy was wrapped in a thin white sheet and placed in a small box for his homecoming.


Even then, there was no end to our ordeal. When the time came to bury him, the road to the cemetery was too dangerous. We went to the mosque in Amiriya but the people there wouldn’t take Ahmed. My husband and I thought we’d better put him in our garden, but our families said that wouldn’t be right.


In the end we had no alternative but to bury our little one in a patch of wasteland. We’ve cried about this every day since, thinking that it was perhaps a sin to leave him in such a place.


Last week we abandoned him altogether when we left our country for the safety of Jordan. I’ve had an operation and now I’m left with just my thoughts.


My suffering is multiplied countless times across Iraq every day. The Americans said they came to liberate us. Is this the freedom they promised?