Indian Nurses in Iraqi Hospital Wait for Violence to Subside....

Forty-six nurses from the southern Indian state of Kerala are secluded in a hospital in Tikrit, the Iraqi city that was captured by extremists on June 11, unable to leave amid the violence and chaos that have gripped the country.Abandoned by most of the hospital’s Iraqi staff, the nurses, whose homes in Kerala are worlds away from the desert city in which they now live, stayed behind because they had nowhere to go. They have been isolated since the city was taken over by Islamist forces and are now awaiting help. Some want assurances of safe passage.“We don’t know what’s going on outside,” said Tona Joseph, 24, who said her twin sister, Veena, also a nurse, was sitting beside her in a patient’s ward on the second floor of the hospital. “We haven’t stepped outside for the last five days.”Interviewed by telephone, the nurses said they believed that fighters were nearby, perhaps even in front of the hospital. Some patients stayed behind, as well as a few doctors. The nurses said they had been staying in the patients’ wards. On Wednesday, the Indian government announced that 40 Indian construction workers had been kidnapped from the Iraqi city of Mosul.Soumya K.B., a 26-year-old nurse who said she sat beside Tona, said that Iraq was peaceful when she arrived 10 months ago. But the day the violence hit Tikrit, most of the Iraqi staff members in the hospital left and did not come back.“Everyone else has deserted us,” she said.Veena Joseph said that some offered parting words of advice: Leave the country as soon as possible. Things will escalate.The nurses were visited by the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian organization, and were told that fighters were nearby. The Red Crescent charged the nurses’ cellphones, which has enabled them to stay in touch with their families.The nurses said they had stopped watching television, which plays only Iraqi news, because it was dominated by images of gun fighting and its programming was in a language that they could not understand.“We don’t feel like watching it anymore,” said Ms. Joseph, who like many in Kerala is Christian, and now spends much of her time praying. “It was scaring us.”Ms. Joseph said that they heard gunfire and bomb blasts in the evening two days ago, which lasted half an hour and shook the hospital walls. The nurses opened their windows so that the glass would not break, and they took shelter in the hallway to wait out the fighting.“The Red Cross said that they will try to rescue us once the road clears up,” Tona Joseph said. “They said they can’t confirm if the officers in front of the hospital are army or ISIS.” Many of the militants who took control of Tikrit on June 11 are aligned with the extremist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.Not all of the other staff members abandoned them. A few stayed and are bringing the nurses tea and samoun, a type of Iraqi bread. The nurses said they did not know how they would manage to find food should the kitchen staff leave. Before the Red Crescent arrived, the nurses said, they were running out of water.The nurses made their journey from their villages in Kerala to help pay off their families’ debts, they said. The father of the Joseph twins said that each of his three daughters had taken nursing jobs in Delhi because the salaries in Kerala were very low. An agency in Delhi placed them in Iraq.“We thought about it a lot, but the money was good,” said the father, C.C. Joseph, speaking by phone from his village. “We have debts.”He said that he was unsure if he could marry his three daughters off on the money he makes as a truck driver and that the salaries in Tikrit were too good to pass up.Sumi Jose, a nurse from Kothamangalam, in central Kerala, said that she paid the placement agency 150,000 rupees, or $2,488, for her job. She said she took the position in Iraq to help her father, a farmer, back home.“We knew it was a dangerous country, but we need to look after our families,” she said.The Iraqi Ministry of Health has recruited hundreds of nurses from India, according to the Indian Embassy’s website. Several thousand Indians now live and work in Iraq, and according to the embassy website, the number was growing because extensive reconstruction of the country has created more jobs.The nurses who were interviewed all said they wanted to return home, though they said that others in the group wanted to keep working in Iraq.The nurses said they had been assured by their families, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Red Crescent that they were safe.“Everyone seems to be saying that nothing will happen to us,” said Ms. Jose. “I hope they turn out to be right.”