December 10, 2005

The election of the new parliament will hold next Thursday.
The situation in the city of Mosul is very stressful. The US convoys wandering through out the city day and night. The police cars full of policemen holding gun aiming at the pedestrians and firing their guns at any car which fail to stop or approaching the convoy.

From the other side there were explosions every where, masked gunmen attacking the US soldiers and the Iraqi police. The roads are blocked by either a concrete blocks or barbed wires making the moving in the city streets very difficult and dangerous.

In Mosul there are five bridges across the river Tigris joining the two sides of the city together, during the last few days, all the bridges are either blocked completely or there were a check points at the beginning of the bridges to search all the cars which attempt to cross the bridge. This make the movement across the bridge very very difficult.

Me for example, my house and the hospital in which I work are in different side of the city, that means I have to cross the bridge twice. Most of the time I reached the hospital about an hour or more late. This is true for all the staff.
At the end of the day I have to go home for lunch and then to the clinic, I have to cross the bridge again, and I shall consider that I must leave the clinic before the Sunset for security reasons (all the Doctors and Pharmacists closed their clinics and Pharmacies before Sunsetmy), I stayed in the clinic for very short period of time.

The patients and sick people will suffer more if they have to go to the hospital at night. The curfew started at 10:00 PM after that, if they go out of their houses they may get killed before they reached the hospital, even the ambulance can't get out after the curfew. The City roads look empty just after the Sunset, it is too dangerous to wander in your car after the Sunset. Many people had been killed or seriously injured, just because they can't recognise an American car at dark or fail to stop at an appropriate distance from a check point.

Early this month two persons, one of them is a Surgeon kidnapped by a gangs which asked for ransom to free them. The Surgeon pay the ransom, but the other guy managed to escape from the kidnappers and go to the police, They did nothing except the declare in Nineveh TV that the police rescued a victim from his kidnappers.

We wait the result of the election, although we know it in advance, but just to see what will happen to the security after the new government take over the control.