Besides having to include among their patients the civilians who fled the self-styled IS caliphate, doctors also have to treat those battling it. From the emergence of IS in June 2014 until the end of 2015 alone, 7,300 Kurdish peshmerga fighters were admitted to public hospitals. A project to build a military hospital to treat the peshmerga has fallen through due to a lack of funding, and so wounded peshmerga are continuing to be treated in public hospitals.
For the freshly graduated doctors working in emergency rooms, the war against IS also means having to treat conditions their textbooks never mentioned, such as sniper wounds and chemical gas attacks.
“It's a disaster. There are sometimes patients we can't even treat because it's too crowded. We are exhausted. You can't concentrate and you might make mistakes,” Dr. Helin Suleiman, 26, told Al-Monitor. “Patients sometimes die because there are not enough doctors,” she said.
Pessimistic about how the situation will unfold, and sick of the incessant confrontations with patients’ families, Suleiman said that she, too, wanted to emigrate to “anywhere but Kurdistan,” although she said she will not because it would be inappropriate for a single woman to travel alone. “We are all thinking about quitting,” she insisted. “The situation will get worse and worse.”
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