Baghdad doctors strike over police attacks

BAGHDAD, Mar 20 (Reuters) Striking doctors shut down one of Baghdad's busiest hospitals today and said the government would face the prospect of an exodus of physicians unless it protected them from violence at the hands of police.

A security official at Yarmouk hospital, which has taken in thousands of bloodied victims since the U.S. invasion three years ago, said doctors and nurses left and the hospital locked its doors after a staff member was beaten by security forces.

Similar strikes have hit Yarmouk and other hospitals before.

Underlining the chaos that grips medical facilities swamped by victims of Iraq's relentless violence, surgeon Ali Abdul Wahid described the incident today at Yarmouk, calling it typical of violence that was making his job impossible.

He heard screaming from the hallway as he treated the wounded from a roadside bomb attack that killed three policemen and three risoners they were escorting: ''When I stepped outside, I saw one of our staff being beaten up,'' he said.

''I asked the officer about it and he said 'We are the government and we do what we want','' Abdul Wahid told Reuters.

''We doctors cannot put up with such insults. We may close down this hospital altogether. If they want to bring anyone in for treatment, then they better employ people from Mars.'' SILENT EMERGENCY ROOM Doctors in white smocks abandoned the emergency room, where a father held his son and scanned the blood-stained floor and empty beds.

It is one spot in Baghdad, flooded with victims of blast wounds, shootings and stabbings, that has come to illustrate how sectarian strife is even penetrating hospitals as patients are wheeled past pools of blood to crude operating rooms.

''Those Interior Ministry forces are without ethics and morals.

They bring their wounded. If we don't immediately provide treatment they beat and insult the doctors and nurses,'' said the security official at Yarmouk in southwest Baghdad.

Doctors complain that the Shi'ite-dominated police and security forces often storm into the hospital and beat people up despite the objections of physicians charged with saving mostly victims of the Sunni Arab insurgency.

In a country starved of medical equipment, medicine and funding for hospitals, doctors who are paid low wages are the most important resource in the medical field.

Nadhum Abdul Hameed, the head of Iraq's Doctor's Syndicate, said his repeated appeals to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to rein in security forces have been ignored.

''We have constantly warned the president about such acts before.

We literally told him that he will never find an available doctor in Iraq,'' he told Reuters.

''Because of this savageness, all doctors will leave their country for good, especially when the government cannot protect them.'' The Yarmouk strike comes at a sensitive time when Iraq's Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders are struggling to form a unity government that can avert a sectarian civil war.

''We are not going to stay in this country and risk the lives of our families unless we get guarantees from a senior Interior Ministry officer of safeguards and a change in attitude,'' said a doctor who asked not to be named.

Reuters SY DB2314