Special Report: Left to fight alone, Afghanistan battles to save wounded

(Reuters) - Omar Gul was on duty at a remote police checkpoint in Helmand's restive district of Sangin when the station came under fire.

It was a warm night in mid-September and the battle between Afghanistan's government forces and Taliban militants had been simmering in the southern province all summer.

Around sunrise, Gul recalled, he was shot in the leg. For the next twelve hours he bled, and waited, and bled some more, until the fighting died down long enough for a colleague to hoist Gul onto his back and take him to get help.

In the end, it was not his employer – the government ofAfghanistan – who saved his life. After carrying him out of the checkpoint, Gul’s colleagues drove him to a first-aid post run by an Italian NGO called Emergency, whose own ambulance ferried him to the group's hospital in Lashkar Gah, Helmand's capital.

Lying in the hospital two weeks later, Gul said he owed his life to Emergency. If it wasn’t for them, “I would have died,” he said.

Once the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan, ends its combat mission next month, the 350,000-member Afghan National Security Forces will bear responsibility for fighting an increasingly organized and ambitious Taliban insurgency. ISAF’s departure will leave wounded men like Gul dependent on a thinly spread medical system with unreliable supply chains and insecure routes for evacuating the injured.

Interviews with senior Afghan and NATO military officials and local medical staff show some civilian hospitals are scrambling to treat an increasing number of injured soldiers and police. There are also cases of security personnel being treated with poor quality drugs and orders of medical supplies not reaching frontline clinics. If the new Afghan government under President Ashraf Ghani can’t effectively fight the war within its borders and care for its forces, it risks demoralizing the army and police and pushing more young men into the ranks of the Taliban.

"[The government] can't afford to give proper treatment to the police and army," said Faizullah Mohammadi, a surgeon who has been working at Emergency hospital in Lashkar Gah for 10 years.  Read More