232 GQ.COM.AU SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017
“Poms?” responds a hospital director.
“You know, Poms, they’re the British. Americans are Yanks.
We have words for all of these in Australia. Lebanese are ‘Lebbos’.
Greeks are ‘Wogs’. Iraqis are ‘Sand Niggers’.”
The point fails to hit in this room, as it would in Australia, where
those with dual cultural identities often use such would-be
disparaging nomenclatures as a sort of
coat of armour. Al Muderis learnt this
early on. Mocked and belittled by his
newfound orthopaedic peers, often called
a terrorist or told to go back to Curtin, he
realised that, in Australia, owning a label
goes a long way.
We’re inside the Green Zone, perched
near the Republican Palace and an array
of foreign embassies. Ibn Sina, the
hospital we’re visiting is one of – if not the- best government hospital in the
country, a place that gained certain
recognition through the HBO
doc u ment ar y, Baghdad ER.
Here, the vinyl floors are peeling, walls are cracked, and
a cockroach can be seen beneath the desk in Al Muderis’ makeshift
consulting room.
“This is much better than I thought it would be,” he offers.
Some 200 soldiers and officers have been summoned, to be triaged
by Al Muderis over two days. Each has lost a limb, most from direct
battle with IS forces.
For the Iraqi government, the hope is that Al Muderis can return
in a few months and get these men back on their feet. Ideally, back
into battle. This visit marks the first step in the process – triaging,
determining patient suitability and assessing what he’ll need
going forward.
The first challenge of the exercise quickly rears its head – that is,
most of these men smoke. A lot. Like, three packs a day. Al Muderis
is horrified. None of them could be operated on without a high risk
of infection – too many Malboros prompting poorer blood circulation,
and from that comes a lessened ability to recover from a procedure.
Al Muderis’ osseointegration procedure – fusing a prothesis directly
into bone, advancing the old technique of fitting it over a stump – is
marked by its departure from convention.
He stumbled across it during a period of research in 2008. With
its genesis in tooth implants, the technique has gone on to forever
ameliorate medical treatment. Today, only a handful of global
surgeons conduct such procedures, in part because of the risk of
infection. Al Muderis refuses to operate on any patient who’s smoked
a cigarette within 90 days of surgery.
“Inshallah,” says a paramilitary officer, missing a leg, on being told
to cease smoking immediately.
“God has nothing to do with it!” responds Al Muderis in Arabic.
“Listen,” he adds, softening his tone, ‘God will help the man who
helps himself’.”
After being with Al Muderis for a few days it becomes clear that
he’s part of a long line of secular Iraqis for whom religion is a glib
punching bag. Each morning in his Sydney surgery, he begins
proceedings by proclaiming, in Arabic, laeanakum Allah (God curse
you all). It’s his way of removing fate, and God, from medicine,
which he believes comes down entirely to skill.
Outside the makeshift office, the inpatient room begins to overflow
with injured men and women – all missing limbs. They wear long
faces and often, make-do prosthetics. The masses, to Al Muderis’
dejection, spill outside into an improvised smoking area.
He tends to each patient methodically – usually working in a joke.
“Smoker?” he opens to a police offer whose leg has been amputated
above the knee.
“No, I don’t like it,” shrugs the officer.
“Are you sure you’re Iraqi? Do you
even like tea?”
Another paramilitary officer responds
to the query with another tokenistic,
“Inshallah”.
“God? God did this to you?” says Al
Muderis, only half joking.
“No, it was Satan.”
“It was a religious fanatic...” says Al
Muderis, as the room full of residents
and government officials begins to quiet.
“...I better shut up before you guys take
me and hang me too.”
The office bursts with laughter.
One man, still in evident trauma, recounts the story of running
towards an IS car bombing to steal away a young child from harm.
As the pair sprinted from the scene, a second explosion detonated.
The child, clasped in the officer’s arms, acted as a shield from the
mass of penetrative shrapnel. The child’s body was whisked away in
the force of the violence. Only a small head remained, cradled in the
officer’s hands. The soldier lost an arm. He demonstrates the way he
was holding the child, hugging his one-and-a-half arms to his chest.
The irony that, whether earnestly or facetiously, large swathes
of the West would reflexively assess these patients as ‘terrorists’ is
not lost on the foreigners in the room. The Institute of Economics
& Peace found that, in 2016, Iraqis continued to suffer the world’s
greatest impact from terrorism – an impact score of 9.96 out of 10.
(Australia and the US ranked number 59 and 36 in the world,
respectively – with impact scores of 2.74 and 4.88.) The data makes
clearer what’s an initially murky picture – that the people of Iraq,
indeed the country itself, are the world’s greatest victims of terror.
The day yawns into a steady rhythm of hobbling, downcast
patients feeding in from three different waiting rooms. Each is
x-rayed by staff, then carefully fed into a database by Al Muderis’
assistants. The x-rays will act as an ever-growing chronicle of
lives altered and horrors seen. Over and over, the room hosts
stories of war, of snipers, of suicide bombers, of innumerable
IEDs and RPGs.
As the day wears on, Al Muderis slowly regresses into the Iraqi
mannerisms – and perhaps the identity – he was certain were buried.
He oscillates between Arabic and English, trading thoughts in
rapid-fire Arabic, occasionally punctuating with a blunt, “Really?!
That’s stupid.”
Watch him during his 15-hour day at the hospital, and he’ll never
sit. He never so much as leans against a desk.
“I’m not tired,” he offers. “I just feel sorry for these people. There’s
so many of them.”
“It’s a shame there’s only one Munjed,” says a doctor, after the 22nd
patient is seen.
The steady work is only interrupted by an appointment. If it were
anywhere but the Republican Palace, you get the feeling Al Muderis
would skip it. Continued on p257.“GOD? GOD DID THIS
TO YOU?” SAYS
AL MUDERIS ONLY
HALF JOKING.
“NO, IT WAS SATAN.”