Tears streamed down nurse Fatima Al-Essa’s face as another young man was rolled down the hospital hall on a stretcher, writhing in pain.

It was Feb. 18 and nearly every room on the floor of the Salmaniya Medical Complex was filled with wounded protesters and doctors tending to their injuries.

Bahraini security forces had shot at protesters as they marched toward the Pearl Roundabout, a monument in the capital city, Manama. The soldiers fired high-velocity rifles, so strong that when a bullet hit a demonstrator in the head, it snapped his neck.

“They are shooting to kill people,” Al-Essa said.

Video: Jesse McLean reports from the Salmaniya hospital in Bahrain last February

Audio: Jesse McLean reports from the chaos at Salmaniya hospital last February

She took my hand and shepherded me into a room where Mohammed Khalil Sham lay on a gurney, a bullet lodged just millimetres from his right femur.

“This is my country,” she said. “They are killing, shooting my people. I will go and protest to bring peace.”

Around us, doctors, nurses and medics sprinted from bed to bed, wounded protester to wounded protester.

Several of these medical professionals are the same ones who, on Thursday, were handed lengthy prison sentences by a Bahraini security court. Some face up to 15 years in jail.

The prosecutor claimed the 20 medical workers used the hospital to hide weapons, incite the overthrow of the Sunni government and provoke sectarian hatred.

The court charged that the doctors forcefully occupied the sprawling medical complex for “political purposes.”

That is not what I saw in the days and nights I spent at the hospital in February.

I saw doctors, indefatigable despite working for days straight, treating Shiite demonstrators who had been injured by tear gas, projectiles and bullets.

Some of them criticized the actions of the monarchy to a swarm of foreign reporters who descended on the hospital, not to stoke the flames of revolution but to stop the death and damage the government had unleashed on its citizens.

“The medical professionals have been, unfortunately, made part of a political game,” Abdulrazzaq al-Saiedi, a senior researcher for the Middle East and North Africa with Physicians for Human Rights, said Thursday.

“The doctors are on the front lines of these conflicts,” he said. “They treat the injured . . . To the government, the injured are the enemies.”

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The harsh sentences given to the doctors suggest Bahrain’s Sunni authorities will not stop punishing those they accuse of supporting the Shiite-led uprising.

Another 28 medical professionals still have charges against them. Their court dates are in late October, al-Saiedi said.

One man said his brother, the director of a maternity hospital in Bahrain, has been detained since March. He said the doctors should be applauded, not imprisoned.

“They were heroes,” said the man, who asked not to be named out of the fear the government will punish his family.

“They were trying their best to help the people who needed help. Many of them were working 24 hours a day. There were too many injured, too many people needed help.

“The reward for them was to be put in jail, to be tortured. This is ridiculous and unacceptable.”

Several of the doctors and nurses I met in Bahrain were unreachable Thursday. Most of their numbers appeared to be out of service.

Back in the Salmaniya hospital in February, Dr. Nehad Al-Shirawi stood in the intensive care unit as the man who had been shot in the head breathed through a ventilator.

Al-Shirawi, who had spent years working in military hospitals, said the protesters’ injuries were among the worst she had ever seen.

“It’s very stressful. We have never experienced something this terrible,” she said. “We are just trying to help.”