Ellen Gray: Film exposes violence in Baghdad

BAGHDAD HOSPITAL: INSIDE THE RED ZONE. 8:30 tonight, HBO.

BEFORE THE United States invaded Iraq nearly five years ago, the most common operation performed by Dr. Ali Abdul Wahed, an Iraqi surgeon, was removing appendixes.

Now he spends his days removing "bits of bombs from people's bodies."

That's how doctor-turned-filmmaker Omer Salih Mahdi introduces one of the few members of the medical staff of Al-Yarmouk hospital willing to be filmed for the documentary that became "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone," which premieres tonight on HBO.

Like HBO's 2006 "Baghdad ER," Mahdi's film focuses largely on those who suffer and those who treat the injuries resulting from the day-to-day violence in a city where just walking to the corner store can get you blown up.

But those previous victims were U.S. soldiers, and these are Iraqi civilians, many of them children, like 7-year-old Hussein, described as "the lucky one" among the friends he'd been playing with in the street when a bomb went off.

The others, we're told, were "being buried today."

In a conflict where the casualties on all sides are more likely to be statistics than names and faces, it's not hard to guess why we're not seeing much footage like this from Iraq on the nightly news.

But, then, the Western journalists and the Iraqis who risk their lives working with them aren't likely to get anything like this level of access to a civilian hospital that treats the victims of sectarian violence.

Not when the medical staff itself is under constant threat for insisting on treating Shiites and Sunnis alike.

The filmmaker himself thinks he was only granted permission - after a considerable wait - because he's a doctor.

"You won't see a film like this again," warns Mahdi, who's now in the United States studying journalism on a Fulbright scholarship. Earlier, his safety and that of his family were enough of a concern that he had his narration recorded by an actor. He's never seen onscreen.

When he travels with an ambulance crew to a Shiite neighborhood where a bomb has just "martyred" a number of civilians, he's warned that his life might be in danger if he continues filming.

He stops.

Al-Yarmouk is where sectarian violence comes home to roost: Most of the victims are Shiites, we're told, most of the bombers Sunni or their "friends," al Queda.

Yet, a Sunni ambulance driver makes a point of telling Mahdi that "we're all brothers," including his Shiite colleagues. Their shared, intense interest in the World Cup provides some distraction from the ongoing violence.

Ambulance workers, we're told, have been killed "mistakenly by Americans," and not so mistakenly by others. And ambulances have also been commandeered by terrorists and used as car bombs.

You probably won't see that on "ER."

Mahdi is particularly struck by a wounded Shiite woman who's screaming for the return of Saddam Hussein.

"Incredible," says the actor reading his words. "But now I hear many Iraqis calling for his return. The known terror of Saddam was more bearable than the random terror of a bomb going off as they walk down the street."

Still, he adds, "I think that if the foreign troops left right now, it would be a disaster. . . . It keeps a lid on things, to a degree." *

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