After fleeing Saddam, doctor returns home
Iraqi-Australian surgeon helped pioneer technique that could help soldiers who have lost their limbs
BAGHDAD— A young Iraqi soldier wheeled himself into a makeshift examination room in Baghdad’s best government hospital and used his elbows to climb onto the bed. Ripping off an array of straps, he removed a worn prosthetic leg so Dr. Munjed al-Muderis could examine his stump.
Al-Muderis, an Iraqi-Australian orthopedic surgeon, was back in his hometown for the first time since he escaped in 1999 after being ordered to cut off the earlobes of army deserters. He had come at the personal behest of Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider alAbadi, who has an army full of soldiers with limbs lost in the relentless battle against Daesh. Some 200 such amputees had been summoned to be triaged over two days. As he worked through the throng, al-Muderis, 45, never sat or even so much as leaned on a desk. When I asked at one point if this was the most amputees he had ever seen in a day, he replied, “It’s the most amputees anyone’s seen in a day.”
He was looking for candidates for osseointegration, a surgical procedure that eschews the centuries-old approach of fitting a socket over a stump. Instead, doctors drill titanium rods into the remaining bone and attach them to advanced prostheses, creating more dynamic limbs.
The technique originated with tooth implants, and al-Muderis has helped pioneer its use on arms and legs, operating on dozens of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at hospitals in Australia, Britain, Cambodia, Germany, the Netherlands and Lebanon.
“It’s very important for them to feel like they are back to normal again,” al-Abadi told the doctor, speaking of the injured soldiers. Later, al-Abadi said that al-Muderis “shows that Iraqis are very resilient.”
Al-Muderis, scion of one of Baghdad’s nine original ruling families, escaped a brutal regime only to face what he described as a dehumanizing asylum system in Australia. Now, he lives in a harbourside mansion in Sydney and drives an Aston Martin to a private hospital, where he performs common hip and knee surgeries as well as osseointegration.
Al-Muderis’s wealthy Sunni family was considered “sadeh” — descendants of a bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad. Young Munjed grew up with servants and chauffeurs, part of what was called the Nestlé generation — which, like chocolate, might melt at the first sign of hard times.
At 12, after watching The Terminator, he became fascinated by the idea of robotic limbs. He went on to study medicine at Baghdad University, though the first Persian Gulf War delayed his graduation until 1996. He married a fellow student and had a son named Ahmed, but the mar- riage was quickly annulled.
Al-Muderis was a first-year resident at Saddam Hussein Medical Center in Baghdad in 1999 when, he said, military police marched a queue of rogue soldiers into the dingy operating theatre. Police ordered the doctors to amputate the soldiers’ earlobes, citing decree 115/1994, alMuderis recalled; when the lead surgeon refused, citing the Hippocratic oath, he was shot dead in the hospital parking lot.
Al-Muderis, then 27, said he slipped into the women’s changing room and locked himself in a cubicle. Hunched over porcelain, he listened to each passing voice and footstep with dread. Five hours later, he heard a group of women enter and wash their hands, and decided it was safe to sneak away.
Less than a week later, his family smug- gled him into Jordan with about $20,000 (U.S.) taped to his stomach. From there, al-Muderis said, he flew to Malaysia, then Indonesia, where he handed over his passport and $2,000 for a spot on a fishing boat bound for Australia. He described a harrowing 36-hour journey in which he cared for pregnant and elderly passengers in a sardined mass of humanity, urine and vomit.
When al-Muderis first received a phone call from the Iraqi prime minister’s office in February, he joked that the invitation was a ruse — a plot to kill him for fleeing two decades earlier. He went anyway, he said, out of insatiable curiosity and a distant sense of duty.
Al-Abadi said his goal was to get amputee soldiers back into battle. “It is very important psychologically for them,” he told al-Muderis. “If they are fit, they can fight again.”
Al-Muderis is scheduled to return to Baghdad in August to operate on at least 50 patients. During the May visit, he and two Australian assistants examined patients and collected X-rays, searching for surgical candidates.
He spoke to patients in rapid-fire Arabic, punctuated occasionally with a blunt word in English: “Really?”
One middle age man was missing one leg and struggling to make the other work. His injuries had robbed him of something fundamental: He could stand on crutches or lie down, but could no longer really sit. Yet the man still worked every morning in a pastry shop.
Al-Muderis, shaking his head and swearing as he interviewed the man about his condition, promised to operate to give him more flexion, more bend, through his hip. “It will fix some of his suffering,” he explained.