FROM the outside it's a prefabricated building in the midst of the desert, an unremarkable, one-storey white block. Inside, it may be the busiest trauma hospital in the world.
In the past week, more than 100 casualties have been shuttled into the British-run Camp Bastion hospital in southern Afghanistan, more than half with major trauma from explosions and requiring surgery.
The wounded, and sometimes dead, have inclu
ded British, American and Danish soldiers, members of the Afghan army and police, and civilians caught up in the crossfire as the battle against the Taleban has intensified across Helmand province.
"It's the busiest trauma hospital in the world," said a member of Britain's airborne medical response team, pausing barely long enough to catch his breath after delivering another two casualties from a hovering Chinook helicopter.
"At least, this week it has been. Busier than anywhere in Iraq. Busier than Johannesburg," he said, referring to the city in South Africa with a notoriously high crime rate and one of the busiest hospitals in the world. "It's non-stop."
The Taleban has stepped up attacks in recent weeks, mounting ambushes and planting roadside bombs across the province, one of the most volatile in Afghanistan. The upsurge was expected – in past years the Taleban has taken advantage of the dry summer months and the end of the opium poppy growing season to step up their activities. But this year's rise in violence has surprised even medics.
"I've been in-theatre six weeks and in that time we've dealt with around 500 casualties," said Colonel Iain Moles, the commanding officer of the hospital, showing a reporter around the facility as doctors readied to receive more wounded. "Which-ever way you look at it, that's substantial. Everything has shot up since July," he said.
July was bad, but June was the deadliest recent month for British troops, with 13 killed as the Taleban mounted stiff resistance across Helmand. In July four were killed, and two have died in August.
US marines serving further south in Helmand and Danish troops, who are part of the 75,000-strong Nato-led force in Afghanistan, have also been in the firing line.
In the hospital, Col Moles and his 150 staff take in whomever they are brought, including wounded Taleban. A US marine was guarding one bearded, bed-ridden militant, yards from recuperating British soldiers.
Three patients lying alongside each other in the intensive care unit told almost a full story of Afghanistan. In one bed lay an Afghan policeman badly wounded in an attack. Doctors had given him morphine for his pain, but quickly discovered he was an opium addict and that no matter what dose of the drug they gave him it did not help.
In the next bed lay what Col Moles – an Irish family doctor when he's not on deployment – described as a "$10 Taleban", a young man willing to carry out militant attacks for a bit of cash, not because he's a big believer. He had accidentally detonated a roadside bomb as he was planting it, blowing off his right hand and riddling his face with shrapnel.
Two beds down in the pristine ward lay a small Afghan child, barely 18 months old, breathing heavily through a respirator. She had been hit in the abdomen by shrapnel. She was not faring well.
Asked how she was wounded, a nurse said "by a strike", then explained that she'd been hit by US munitions in a mistaken attack on civilians.
FACT BOXMORE than 24 militants were killed in two battles with Nato troops in Afghanistan on Thursday, the coalition said yesterday.
The coalition said that more than a dozen militants were killed after they attacked a coalition base in the Shaheed Hasas district of the southern Uruzgan province. Two Afghan guards died during the attack.
Separately, about a dozen militants were killed during a raid in the eastern Paktika province, by coalition troops searching for a militant responsible for "the movement of foreign fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan".
Militants fired on them during the search and coalition forces fired back, killing the militants, the coalition said.
More than 3,700 people, mostly militants, have died in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan this year.
