Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma

 Healthcare Under Fire: Stories from Healthcare Workers During Armed Conflict 21 of feces in burn pits, and the dehydrating restless nights in the sweltering heat. I was depressed that I would likely miss the birth of my bride’s and my fifth child. The initial ambivalence of our efforts turned to hopefulness but now devolved into despair. We cared for epidemics of dysentery, renal stones from dehydration, and a child struck by a Humvee, looking to get an MRE. His father shared with me about his community’s exhaustion from decades of war, first with Iran, then amongst themselves , and now with the U.S. He longed for peace. Providence smiled into my small world, and my company commander told me while standing in his skivvies in the shower tent that I could re-deploy home with a convoy to Kuwait.After a long journey through the desert and a period of waiting in tents again in Kuwait, I took a 72-hour sleepless, convoluted journey home. We were treated like royalty by the lovely flight attendants on chartered commercial flights. We arrived on the parade deck, greeted as heroes, some of the first to return from war. Hours later, at 0530, our baby girl burst into this turbulent world. Sleep deprived again and overcome by a wave of joy interspersed with the ambivalence of what I just took part in, I sobbed uncontrollably on the phone with my mother. Then I was fine. I moved ahead, caring for my family, my patients, serving my country, and teaching the next generation of physicians. Before completing my Navy career, I deployed once more, this time to Afghanistan in 2011, another war that ended in futility. Years later as I reflect back on the Iraq war, I sometimes wonder if we received a divine, “You’ll reap what you sow,” for the debacle we embarked on in 2003. We did not usher in a new era of freedom in Iraq. Instead, over 4,000 allied troops perished and more than one hundred thousand Iraqis died violent deaths. Waves of suicide bombings continue to rock the country. Political instability checkered with terrorists persists. Thousands more American Veterans were permanently maimed—mentally or physically. As the aphorism declares, war is definitely hell on earth. I am thankful to have served my country even amongst the vagaries and vicissitudes of war, but perhaps Pope Saint John Paul II was right: war is a defeat for humanity. I now cling less to the ideals of political and economic freedom and more to the beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. B Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma Handreen Mohammed Saeed F ollowing the abrupt fall of almost a third of its territory in 2014 to armed militias, Iraq fell into civil war turmoil. As a direct result of the armed conflicts, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were displaced or subjected to atrocious human rights violations with physical, sexual, and psychosocial abuse. While the scenes on the TV provided only a glimpse of what was happening on the ground, the true stories circulating about people’s suffering left me personally in absolute shock. Among those who suffered the most from the offences were marginalized religious and ethnic minority groups, who were viewed and treated as infidels by the aggressor militants. Those marginalized communities not only endured displacement due to the armed conflicts but they were also massexterminated , sexually abused, and underwent massive destruction of their towns and villages. In 2016, I was working for Ministry of Health as a primary care physician in a small town in Iraqi Kurdistan, which hosted tens of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) from one of those marginalized minority communities. I had the opportunity to hear their tragic stories firsthand as they fled for their lives in 2014. Working in those communities as a primary care physician allowed me to truly understand their feelings and emotions and reflect on their experiences while providing healthcare services. This experience sparked an interest in humanitarian work, in which I could be close to areas of need and involved in providing physical health first-aid...