A Day in the Life Of a Baghdad ER

It is morning rush hour in Baghdad, and the emergency-room staff at Yarmouk Hospital is bracing itself for another grim load. Insurgent groups routinely mount their biggest attacks during the commuter crush: the heavy traffic guarantees them a high death toll, and the ensuing snarl-ups prevent police and military units from giving chase. For medical workers like Dr. Jalal Taha Emad, an emergency-room surgeon, each day begins with a foreboding of the mayhem to come. "When I am on my way to work, I sometimes look at people in the cars around me and wonder how many of them will end up on the beds of my hospital. I suppose one day I could be lying on one of them," he says, casting a glance at the ER's 12 iron-frame beds, covered in green plastic sheets that bear the bloodstains of countless patients who have gone before. "But I try not to think about that."

For Iraqis, denial can be the best way to cope with the knowledge that a sudden, violent death is merely a matter of being on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. For the 138,000 U.S. troops serving in Iraq, there are few refuges from the arbitrary violence that continues to plague much of the country; for Iraqi civilians there are none. After a two-month lull following the Jan. 30 election, attacks by insurgent groups have spiked over the past two weeks, coinciding with the formation of a new government. Most of the recent wave of attacks, which have already killed nearly 300 people since early May, are targeted at Iraqi police and security services. But as always, ordinary, defenseless civilians are caught in the middle. In Baghdad just driving to work is a deadly daily game of Russian roulette.

Many of the victims end up in the ER at Yarmouk Hospital, a beige concrete-and-brick building that looks more like an old warehouse than one of the country's best-regarded medical facilities. The Yarmouk district, on Baghdad's western flank, is ringed by the city's most violent neighborhoods, where insurgents tend to concentrate their attacks. Chief surgeon Jamil Bayati estimates that his tiny ER has taken in 10,000 people in the past 12 months and that more than 1,000 of them had "war wounds"--inflicted by insurgents, the U.S. military or Iraqi security forces. Bayati figures that "this is the busiest ER in the world."

To chronicle the devastating toll of the war on the daily lives of Iraqis, I spent part of last week in Bayati's ER. In the midst of my reporting, the story turned highly personal: two members of TIME's Baghdad staff became victims of a bomb blast and were rushed to Yarmouk Hospital. From that point on, I was intimately involved in nearly every decision the doctors and staff made as they struggled to keep my badly wounded colleagues alive. In the process, I experienced the anger, anxiety, frustration and sorrow that so many Iraqis must endure, often in far greater measure, on a daily basis. For every story like ours--which turned out better than we could ever have hoped--there are dozens of others at the ER that end in quiet tragedy.