Word: baghdad
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...groups are also hard-pressed to come to a country where a large percentage of budgets must go to protecting foreigners. It is also of deep concern that humanitarian projects cannot be easily monitored because of a lack of security. For the handful of foreign NGOs currently in Baghdad the situation is frustrating, they say, because of the lack of direct contact with their Iraqi beneficiaries. "You are dependent on secondhand information - you could be in Amman or Washington or Paris," says Guy Siri, who says he can count the number of international aid agencies in Baghdad on one hand...
...current U.N. mission in Baghdad is tiny. Their cramped offices are located at the end of a series of concrete and razor-wire-lined streets in the Green Zone, accessed through Fijian, Peruvian and Ugandan checkpoints. Meanwhile, UNICEF, the U.N.'s children's aid organization, is the most conspicuously absent. Others, such as the World Health Organization, UNHCR (the U.N.'s refugee agency) and the U.N. Development Programme have between zero and three people in Baghdad at any given time. The security alert for the office is at level four, one stage before evacuation...
...representative from the intrepid international medical organization Doctors Without Borders (which goes by its French acronym MSF), which operates in such dangerous and far-flung places as the Central African Republic, Somalia and Darfur, says, "the security is not allowing us to go to Baghdad." MSF was operational in Iraq in 2003 from April to Nov 2004 when it closed its projects and withdrew their staff. "It became increasingly dangerous to be even associated with a humanitarian organization," he says. Today MSF has an office in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, where it is considerably safer but also...
...morning in April 2003, Dr. Said Hakki woke up in his Tampa, Florida, home and drove to the hospital where he had worked for years to perform a routine prostate surgery. After scrubbing out, he drove to the airport, caught a flight to Washington, D.C and then another to Baghdad, the hometown he hadn't seen in 20 years. "It went back centuries - not decades," Dr. Hakki says of his first impressions. Now the president of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, the country's largest aid group, he bemoans the lack of humanitarian assistance in Iraq. "I used to treat...
When Dr. Hakki returned to Iraq in 2003, the major hurdles facing him and other aid workers were those of the organizational and infrastructure kind, not bombings and beheadings. He recalls many late nights driving home safely along Haifa Street, a central Baghdad artery that later became a safe haven for insurgents and snipers. Back when it was safer, Dr. Hakki had to drive down the wrong side of the street because U.S. Marines were busy using the other side for nighttime soccer matches with neighborhood kids. For goalposts, says Dr. Hakki, they used their helmets and body armor. Nowadays...