The atrocities of war

I have never seen so many injured, so much blood, and so many dead. Misrata was a killing field. Based at a hospital in Misrata, when out of the front-line I was still surrounded by it all.

I felt helpless, useless even. Medics rushed around as porters dragged in more of the injured and the dying. Wounds were cleaned, drips were inserted, and doctors tried in vain to resuscitate a man. And all I could do was stand there, taking pictures.

The Libyans I have met have been almost universally grateful that we, the foreign press, were there. They thanked us, telling us that we were risking our lives for their struggle. But we had the choice to be there. We could leave, we could jump on the next boat out. But this was their city, and their lives. They had been suffering this for weeks, and the situation showed no sign of changing in the weeks to come.

In Benghazi, graffiti praised Al-Jazeera, CNN, the BBC, for internationalising their struggle, for coming to their aid and telling the world what was happening. But here in Misrata, as body parts hung from shredded limbs, as blood poured from lethal head-wounds, documenting all this seemed superfluous to me at times. There was so much suffering. And people would ask “where are Nato, what are they doing?” And I had no answer for them.

The rising toll of the war

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Today was a hard day.

Fighting had been hard on Tripoli Street, today, where I had witnessed the rebels making some gains. But arriving back at the hospital, bringing a man injured on the front-line, it was clear that fighting throughout the rest of the city had been even harder.

The rebels were making a concerted effort to consolidate their positions, but were doing so with heavy losses.

Pick-up trucks and ambulances a steady screech of tyres as they arrived outside the hospital, overwhelming the already exhausted medics working in the triage tent.

“In the theatre now, there are two amputations now” said a doctor, adding that throughout the day, he had seen a lot of gunshot wounds to the head. “This afternoon is getting worse.” The corridors of the hospital are lined with beds, the wounded spilling out from the wards.

And as the afternoon dragged on, the dead became harrowingly apparent. In the space of half an hour, three corpses were brought out of the hospital, taken away for immediate burial in a stream of wooden coffins.

The cries of la illa illa Allah never seemed to stop, as mourners and hospital staff cried out the Muslim chant of “there is no god but God”. This was pushing many here close to breaking point, as they asked “how can Qaddafi do this to his own people?”

It would be a busy night for the grave diggers, and many would wake in the morning to find their family torn apart.

Saving Sudan’s “Lost Mothers”

South Sudan has one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the world, and within the country, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal state suffers the most, with one in seven mothers dying as a result of child birth.

In the state’s only hospital, a team from Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) is trying to improve practices so that mothers are not risking their lives whilst trying to grow their families.

The maternity ward is spartan, but with life-saving techniques—and drugs—MSF have reduced the mortality rate from 14% to 0.6%.

When staff at the hospital left us alone with two screaming mothers in labour, I hoped that today, I would not be delivering my first baby, as well as just witnessing my first birth.

Read more here in Jean-Marc’s piece on our trip.