With bombs falling around them, Doctors Without Borders refused to leave Iraq
Continuing to work in a Baghdad hospital
Treating the torrent of sick and wounded
Despite the dangers of war.
It wasn't long before two
Members of the Medecins Sans Frontieres
As the group is known internationally
Were carted away to the regime's
Most notorious prisons
By the Iraqi secret police, accused of being spies.
"The way that they presented it,
[it is]
As if they don't believe humanitarian work at all,
" Said Ibrahim Younis, 31, an aid worker
Taken from his hotel April 2
Along with Francois Calas, 44,
Head of the doctors' Baghdad mission.
Calas and Younis were held in a vast jail
And two crowded prisons
Before being freed April 11.
The two men and four volunteer doctors
Who worked at al Kindi hospital
In northeast Baghdad resumed
Their healing work a short time later.
"I'm still here and I'm ready to go on working,
" Calas told CNN from Baghdad.
"We see today more and more needs emerging
And ... we're still here and we are ready
To do our humanitarian work."
Founded in 1971, Doctors Without Borders
Dispatches 2,500 medical
Professionals around the world
Each year to aid victims of armed conflict,
Natural disasters and epidemics.
Its volunteers have been kidnapped in Chechnya,
Died in Honduras and worked with
Victims of Rwanda's civil war.
Although it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999,
The group shies away from the media spotlight.
"This group plunges its doctors and nurses
Into some of the most dire
Physical danger in the world,
" Wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
in an editorial after the
Doctors won the Nobel Prize.
"With humane hearts and
A will to make a difference,
The organization has sometimes wrought miracles."
Volunteer doctors risk bombs to Aid Iraq's wounded
By Jeordan Legon
CNN
