Communication gap led to delay in nurses' arrival

A communication gap delayed the arrival of the 46 Kerala nurses at the Erbil airport on Friday. The bus that was to fetch them first went to the wrong pick-up point on the Kurd border, leading to anxious moments for officials and passengers holed up in strife-torn Iraq.

The nurses, who were working in a hospital in Tikrit that fell to Sunni insurgents, under the banner of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), started their journey from Mosul to Erbil airport around 12:30 pm IST and were to be fetched from the border area of Kurdistan.

However, the bus went to a different pick-up point resulting in a delay. “There was a communication gap. The bus went to the other side. They had to cover some distance,” Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy told reporters.

As the nurses were taken to Erbil, many of them telephoned their families providing details about their journey.

Following negotiations, the nurses were moved out of Tikrit on Thursday by those believed to be linked with the ISIS. There was no official word on the modalities of how the nurses were evacuated.

Chandy, who rushed to Delhi on Wednesday following calls from nurses holed up in Iraq and their families in Kerala, had held consultations with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj a number of times in the past couple of days. Chandy was briefed regularly by ministry officials on the progress in evacuating the nurses from the strife-torn area.

An Air India Boeing 777 was sent to Erbil at 5 pm IST on Friday and is expected to reach before midnight. The flight will take off from Erbil around midnight and reach Kochi on Saturday morning and then head to Delhi.

“The plane will have no stopover and it will directly fly to Kochi. There may some other Indians from Iraq in that plane but the plane will first touch down in Kochi,” Chandy said.

The External Affairs Ministry has said that around 70 Indians from Kirkuk will also be on the flight.

Chandy appreciated the help provided by the central government and the Indian Embassy in Baghdad to achieve the “great aim” of bringing back the nurses to Kerala.

Kerala has also sent its Resident Commissioner in Delhi Gyanesh Kumar and Additional Resident Commissioner Rachna Shah in the special aircraft to Erbil to bring back the nurses.

The chief minister had raised the issue with the Centre in mid-June itself. CPM MPs P Karunakaran and P Rajeeve also took up the issue with the external affairs minister last week.