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NYT
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 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.
"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 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.
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.
