By Maggie Michael
TEHRAN, March 17 (Reuters) – As U.S. and Israeli air strikes pound Tehran, Iranian rescue workers are braving the risk of secondary attacks and say they are suffering trauma from the horror of pulling dead children from the rubble.
The rescue teams are responding to a daily barrage of strikes across the city, and one worker told Reuters that on each of the 10 days he had been working since the war began, he had been on between two and 10 call-outs.
More than 1,300 people have been killed in the strikes on Iran, according to local authorities, and there seems no prospect of respite for the Iranian Red Crescent Society workers who deal with the aftermath of the blasts.
Iran’s Red Crescent, the local affiliate of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, has built up decades of experience in handling the aftermath of disasters because of Iran’s frequent earthquakes.
Nevertheless, Reza Mohammad Doost, a Red Crescent volunteer for 13 years, said rescuers suffered so much from their experience in the current conflict that their hands often shook. “They have problems sleeping, eating and they feel so much stress,” he said.
Israel and the United States launched the war on February 28, calling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes a threat, and citing its support for militant groups in the Middle East and its quashing of internal protests.
Iran, which denies its nuclear programme is a threat, has responded to the attack by firing missiles and drones at Israel and countries that host U.S. bases, and by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
“We take precautions but we are not fearful,” said Navvab Shamspour, a senior Red Crescent official, describing how a rescue team would pull out as soon as they heard warplanes overhead in case of further attacks on the same area.
“The hardest part is that I have to rescue people and take care of my team, because there were missions where a strike takes place just 10 minutes after an initial strike,” he said.
In east Tehran’s Resalat district, a massive concrete skeleton was all that remained of a residential building, standing amid wrecked cars, rubble, torn shreds of cloth, twisted metal and shattered ceramics.
RESCUE TEAMS STRUGGLE WITH TRAUMA
A rescue worker pulled items from the rubble – a teddy bear without a head, a photo of a woman wearing a silver bracelet – before the sound of jets overhead sent them all scurrying for cover.
Dealing with distraught relatives watching the team pull bodies from the rubble poses its own difficulties. “This is very hard on us,” Shamspour said.
When rescue teams arrive at a bomb site, they are crowded by families looking for loved ones they fear were killed or trapped in the rubble. “Imagine – they can be just satisfied if they find just the dead body. Even the dead body,” said Doost.
A strike on the first day of the war hit a school, killing scores of schoolgirls, Iranian officials have said. Israel and the United States say they do not target civilians and are investigating.
At the Red Crescent office, rescue workers and staff chatted, watched television and played table tennis and table football, trying to ease the tension between call-outs.
Mohammad Jannat Ammani, a cleric in a white turban, had started volunteering for the society months ago while visiting his sick grandfather in Tehran from his home in the Shi’ite Muslim seminary city of Qom.
He joined up on an impulse when seeing Red Crescent members working in the hospital where his grandfather was a patient, he said, adding “it was just an accident… I felt I had to do something”.
(Reporting by Maggie Michael; Writing by Angus McDowall, Editing by William Maclean)
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