Specialist cardiac hospital on the way in Basra

BASRA / IraqiNews.com: Building works on a specialist cardiac hospital are currently underway in Basra province, the head of the local construction unit said on Wednesday. “A modern heart surgery hospital will be established on an area of 1,500 square meters in Basra’s al-Zaytoun neighborhood at a cost of over 29.4 billion Iraqi dinars (1 U.S. dollar = 1,118 Iraqi dinars),” Engineer Ziyad Ali Fadhel told IraqiNews.com. The hospital is four storeys high with operating rooms, rooms for physicians and several annexes, Fadhel noted. Work on the building is expected to last 18 months, Fadhel added. Basra, 590 km (340 miles) south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, has an estimated metropolitan population of 2,300,000 in 2008. Basra, a Shiite province with 20% of the population are Sunnis, is the cradle of the first civilization of Sumer. It has the seven main Iraqi ports. The first built in Islam 14 A.H. (After Hegira), the city played an important role in early Islamic history. SS (P) 1