Only Cry For The Living: Memos From Inside The ISIS Battlefield by Hollie S. McKay

Author:Hollie S. McKay [McKay, Hollie S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: war, front lines, iraq, Military
Publisher: Jocko Publishing & Di Angelo Publications
Published: 2021-03-08T06:00:00+00:00

A SPECIAL CLINIC

November, 2016

For many who had been struck in the war and survived, life was reduced to waiting on other people — waiting for the magical thing that could give you back what you lost.

So much time in Iraq was spent in hospitals or thrown-together medical facilities. Hospitals had become the centerpiece for not only the living and the dead, but also for those caught on the cusp between life and death.

There was one clinic atop Sinjar, erected at the place where thousands had died of starvation and dehydration in the thick of the ISIS barrage below. The farming community, left languishing on the mountain, had since survived scorching summers and snowy, bitter winters with next to no outside assistance. That single medical facility near the winding mountain peak had saved them.

The clinic was an ad-hoc room with six patient beds and a handful of medications, run by a thirty-six-year-old woman the locals lovingly called “Hero Doctor Khansa.” She was, in fact, not a doctor, but a nurse from Rojava and a refugee herself, having fled Syria after ISIS attacked in 2014. Late one night, Khansa Ali told me that she had simply started visiting displacement tents of those in need. In early 2015, demand for her aid had grown so big that she decided to set up a small clinic near the peak.

“I stay here, and I work twenty-four hours if I have to, whenever someone walks in,” Khansa passionately explained from the clinic. “People have many problems — skin diseases, pregnancy complications. The hardest part to help is with the psychological illnesses. The children suffer the worst.”

Khansa and her small team lived and breathed what was left of life at that clinic. Every day, dozens of the desperate came in — sometimes with mumps or measles, sometimes with their skin raw and bloody from skin infections.

Sometimes they came in with nausea, and sometimes they came in simply because they just needed to know that somebody was there. Their lives had been inscribed into stories, written with tears and blood and sickness, but their stories would not be erased.

The notion that someone like Khansa Ali cared and might help them was a powerful one.

“The Yazidi people are very kind people,” Khansa said. “They will give you everything they have. That pushes me to want to help them. It is an obligation for me.”

Since she was a small child, Khansa had a zest for healing. She loved books and movies about doctors; she was fascinated by medical objects and operation rooms.

Several months later, I was on a flight to Afghanistan when I learned from Yakhi that the Yazidis’ only medical clinic on Mount Sinjar — Khansa’s pride — had been damaged by Turkish airstrikes. Many of the genocide survivors living in squalid, ripped tents with little aid, electricity, or medical care had again fled for their lives. This time, they were running down the mountain as Turkish warplanes struck in and around the mountaintop for almost an hour.

Khansa had survived the sudden Turkish bombing by luck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.