Iraqi surgeon returns home to help wounded
Doctor has pioneered use of surgical procedure that allows advanced prostheses for amputees
Ayoung 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 al-Abadi, who has an army full of soldiers with limbs lost in the relentless battle against the Islamic State.
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.
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 harborside 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’ wealthy Sunni family was considered “sadeh” — descendants of a bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad. Young Munjed grew up with servants and chauffeurs.
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 marriage 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 theater. Police ordered the doctors to amputate the soldiers’ earlobes, citing decree 115/1994, al-Muderis 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 smuggled him into Jordan with about $20,000 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.
After docking on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, al-Muderis was vacuumed up into Australia’s refugee system and given a number: 982. He said he was not called by his name for a nearly a year at the Curtin Immigration Detention Center in remote Western Australia.
He was granted asylum in August 2000. When he inquired about a job at the Royal Perth Hospital, al-Muderis said, he was told his Iraqi medical license was nearly meaningless there. He moved to Melbourne and married an Iraqi refugee he had met on the boat journey. Within a year, he became accredited as a doctor. He worked in an emergency department, a demanding schedule that he blamed for his divorce a few years later, after the birth of two sons, Adam and Dean.
He later married a Russian-born doctor, Irina, with whom he has an 8-year-old daughter, Sophia. In 2009, he moved to Berlin for a year to study osseointegration.
When al-Muderis first received a phone call from the Iraqi prime minister’s office in February, he joked that the invitation was a plot to kill him for fleeing two decades earlier. He went anyway 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.”