Baby's Plight Bridges Abyss

Media Coverage

Baby's Plight Bridges Abyss
Chicago Tribune December 5, 2003

By Joel Greenberg

HOLON, Israel -- The scene would have been unthinkable nine months ago.

Jassem Abdullah and Iman Majid, a couple from a village near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, sat in a waiting room at a hospital near Tel Aviv this week as their 2-week-old daughter, Bayan, recovered from a life-saving heart operation.

The baby had been brought to Israel by Save A Child's Heart, an Israeli organization that arranges urgent cardiac surgery to children from developing countries.

"Not long ago we were going to work with gas masks, worried about whether we were going to be hit by [Iraqi] Scud missiles," said Dr. Sion Houri, director of pediatric intensive care at the Wolfson Medical Center, where the baby is being treated. "This kind of cooperation shows a different side of both peoples."

Tiny Bayan lay nearby, hooked up to a heart monitor, a small sign of the changes brought by the war in Iraq.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq had been a bitter enemy of Israel. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, 39 Iraqi Scud missiles struck Israel, and there was fear of renewed attacks, possibly with chemical weapons, when the war in Iraq erupted in March.

Bayan's unlikely journey to Israel began at a Kirkuk hospital, where she was brought to a clinic for children run by Lt. Col. John Scott, a U.S. Army doctor and a cardiologist. She was 2 days old: a local pediatrician had detected a heart problem. Scott discovered that the arteries to Bayan's heart were reversed, a deformity that would have been fatal within two weeks of birth.

Jonathan Miles, the head of a Christian volunteer group, had been working to identify Iraqi children in need of heart surgery abroad. He was at the clinic when Bayan was brought in. Miles had been working for years with Save A Child's Heart, finding Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip in need of urgent heart surgery, and he contacted the organization to arrange Bayan's transfer to Israel.

The baby and her parents traveled to Baghdad, where a preliminary surgical procedure was done to ensure that Bayan would survive the journey. The procedure took place after a phone consultation between an Iraqi cardiologist and Dr. Akiva Tamir, director of pediatric cardiology at the Israeli hospital.

"It was just an ordinary conversation between two cardiologists, and I told him that we are happy to treat the baby and would be happy to help in the future," Tamir said.

Accompanied by Miles, the couple and their baby flew out of Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, leaving their 16-month-old son with relatives. After a few days of paperwork, they crossed into Israel and arrived at the hospital.

The heart surgery was performed by Dr. Lior Sasson, a son of Iraqi Jews who had immigrated to Israel in 1949 after an anti-Jewish crackdown in Iraq that followed the establishment of Israel.

The operation was successful, and despite initial complications, Bayan's condition stabilized and doctors reported that she is slowly improving.

Outside the pediatric intensive-care unit this week, Bayan's father, Abdullah, chatted with two Iraqi-born Israelis who had come to visit, seeking information about a long-lost aunt in Iraq.

Abdullah, 29, an Iraqi Kurd who sells ice in his village, said his presence in Israel with his wife and daughter was nothing out of the ordinary.

"In the days of Saddam I could have been killed for this, but now it's natural, no problem," he said. "Iraq is free now. We weren't afraid to come. They treat us here with respect."

The non-profit group covered the $10,000 cost of the baby's surgery and hospitalization and the family's accommodations.

"We're just seeking treatment and we don't care if it happens in Europe or Israel, by Christians or Jews," Abdullah said. "We just want to treat the baby and go back to Iraq."

Down the hall, a few Palestinian mothers from the Gaza Strip watched over their children, also brought for surgery by Save A Child's Heart. Of more than 900 children the group has treated since it was founded in 1995, more than 300 have been Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said Simon Fisher, the group's executive director.

Treatment has continued despite more than three years of violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with arrangements made by Save A Child's Heart to bring the children through army checkpoints to Israel.

"We have very good relations on both the Palestinian and Israeli side, and the army has been extremely cooperative," Fisher said. "Everybody shares a common interest in helping these children."

For Sasson, the Israeli surgeon of Iraqi descent, the operation on Bayan carried special significance.

"My parents fled Iraq and came to Israel, and now this child arrives and we save her life," he said. "In some way, it closes a circle."

Our name Shevet Achim is taken from the Hebrew of Psalm 133: How good and how pleasant for
brothers to dwell together in unity...for there the LORD commanded the blessing--life forevermore.