During a visit to Iraq, 19 years after her first journey in the country, my colleague Marie-Helen Jouve, who served as a programme manager in Jordan to support an MSF medical team stationed in Baghdad in 2003, recalled the immense disorder that followed the first airstrike.
“It was a feeling of complete chaos for us,” she says. “We knew we had to do something, but the weight of the war and the uncertainty of what lay ahead paralysed us.”
Her team, situated in Baghdad, collectively chose to remain in place, aiding the war-wounded and bearing witness to the unfolding war.
The security context kept deteriorating. In the late months of 2005, after my wife gave birth to our first daughter, it became painfully clear that staying in Iraq was no longer safe for me. Medical professionals like me often became targets for attacks. Even humanitarian workers were not immune, which had already led MSF to leave in 2004.
Leaving my beloved family behind, uncertain of when we would reunite, I relocated to Jordan. Shortly after, I found myself joining MSF as a surgeon at their newly established project in Amman.
Fonte original msf.org
