Updated
Australian nurse Taryn Anderson says most of the patients she sees come through the Trauma Field Hospital in Mosul are civilians who have been caught in the crossfire of the ongoing battle for Mosul.
Field hospital nurses are most often required to work alongside military troops but Ms Anderson said her team was treating an "absolutely phenomenal" number of Iraqi civilians — most of them women and children.
"It has very much been a huge challenge for all of us here on the ground. Obviously our casualty numbers have been increasing," Ms Anderson told RN Breakfast.
"[We are seeing] lots of women and children that have finally been liberated after being trapped in the city for sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months and with no food, with no health care.
"It has just been overwhelming in a lot of cases."
A rising number of Iraqi civilians are seeking emergency medical treatment as Iraqi forces launch a final assault to re-take Mosul's Old City — the last district still held by Islamic State militants.
Residents in the western region of Mosul have been left with no choice but to flee but 100,000 civilians are still trapped.
After eight months of fighting, Iraqi special forces and federal police were advancing from the south and west, in an effort to open up humanitarian corridors.
Ms Anderson works for Australian company Aspen Medical, which was contracted by the World Health Organisation to staff and manage two hospitals south of Mosul. This is her third deployment in the area.
She said 90 per cent of injuries the hospital treats are the direct result of the conflict, caused by mortar attacks, shelling, gunshot wounds and building collapses as a result of air strikes.
"You can always tell when the offensive is kicking off just due to the air traffic alone," she said.
"And you can certainly hear the shelling, particularly at night, the airstrikes, and occasionally there will be gunshots a bit closer to the facility."
On top of this, she said the hospital was also seeing patients with medical emergencies who had managed to escape the city and were finally accessing health care for the first time in up to a year.
In recent days, Iraqi forces carried out a leaflet drop warning civilians to avoid open spaces and take any opportunity to escape. Ms Anderson said people were fleeing any way they could.
"We hear stories of them mainly evacuating on foot, but sometimes using vehicles," she said.
Many do not survive the journey.
But the nurse said there were incredible stories of survival that helped make her difficult and often traumatic job worthwhile.
She recounted the story of a 19-year-old woman who, at nine months' pregnant, began experiencing contractions while trapped in Mosul. She had been without food and water for 20 days.
"At that point she knew she had to get out," Ms Anderson said.
"So she and her mother tried to get out on foot. Unfortunately she was shot by a sniper straight through her abdomen and also through her uterus.
"By the time we got this patient to our emergency department we weren't expecting to be able to save one — either the mother or the baby — but were absolutely astounded when we detected a foetal heartrate and were then successfully able to deliver a baby by caesarean section and save the mother's life."
Ms Anderson says such outcomes are made possible by the impressive facilities built by the World Health Organisation.
"We are not working out of tents," she said. "We are working out of containers. We have air conditioning and we have theatres that we are able to sterilise and keep clean.
"So whilst we are living and working within a compound, the actual medical facilities we have here on the ground are fantastic and able to deal with a lot of the trauma that we are seeing coming out of Mosul."
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, foreign-affairs, iraq
First posted