Asked when he last had to treat victims of a car bomb, Iraqi doctor Arif Anwar, an emergency room surgeon at Sulaimaniya's main hospital, dismisses the question with a smile and then starts to laugh.

"Car bomb? Are you joking?" he chuckles, as his white-coated colleagues in the doctors' lounge join the chorus of amusement.

"We don't have anything like that. The biggest problem we have here is car accidents too many car accidents," he says, shaking his head in dismay at the poor quality of local driving.

It is perhaps the starkest reflection of the huge contrast between the secure Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and most of the rest of the country, racked daily by insurgent violence.

The emergency room at Anwar's hospital, a newly built wing that would not look out of place in Europe, sometimes does not handle a single emergency all day. On other days maybe 10 to 15 patients are brought in, the doctors say.

"Maybe someone fell off a ladder, or had an accident with machinery," says Anwar. "Sometimes there are domestic fights, and old people collapse in the heat, but that is it."

The pristine 500-bed hospital has advanced equipment like CT and MRI scanners, a well-stocked pharmacy and an outpatient clinic, facilities unknown to hospitals in Baghdad.

Yarmouk, one of the capital's busiest hospitals, sometimes handles 100 victims of suicide car bombs a day, runs out of anaesthetic regularly, has a bare-bones pharmacy and often no sheets on the beds. Women wash blood from the floors.

The gulf between security in most of Iraq and the Kurdish north shows up not only in the experience of the doctors, but also in daily life. Every evening the streets of Sulaimaniya, a thriving city of around 700,000 people, are thronged.

Young men and women walk or sit together in the parks, while older men gather in cafes to drink tea and play backgammon. Restaurants are packed, music plays and the streets are alive in stark contrast to Baghdad and other troubled cities.

In Baghdad, the streets are crammed with 3.5 meter concrete walls designed to protect against bomb blasts, and many of them are blackened or pock-marked from shrapnel.

In Sulaimaniya there are no blast walls at all, except a ring of two-meter walls round the main hotel. In Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, such blast walls as do exist are painted with bright murals of flowers, waterfalls and gardens.

(China Daily August 11, 2005)