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THE BATTLE FOR HEARTS

March 04, 2008 4:17 PM

Dr Moayad Hamad used to be a heart surgeon.  In fact in 1996 he was the first doctor to see Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, when he was brought in to hospital after an assassination attempt.  Uday had been shot while driving through Mansour in western Baghdad – when he reached the hospital his blood pressure was zero over 20 – almost bled out.  According to Dr Moayad Uday’s bodyguards were selected among other things to have the same blood type as their boss, so the doctors could take blood straight from them and transfuse into Uday.  On that day it saved his life.  (Uday, along with his brother Qusay, were killed in Mosul by US troops in July 2003).

Dr Moayad was not political, but after the 2003 he lost his job as his hospital, Ibn Sina, was taken over by the US military as its main combat hospital in the Green Zone.  His house is in Dora, a once relatively affluent neighborhood in southern Baghdad that became a haven for Al Qaeda extremists.  He began working as a simple physician in his neighborhood, but as Al Qaeda’s grip tightened it became harder for him to function.  By 2006 Dora was one of the most dangerous areas of the entire city, and people barely dared to go out onto the streets.

One day an IED (improvised explosive device) planted at the side of the road outside his house went off as a US patrol passed by – it injured several Americans and blew in all the windows in his house.  He came home and ran from room to room looking for his wife and three year old daughter.  Fortunately he discovered they had left an hour before the blast to visit his mother’s house, but something snapped in him that day.  He decided to make a stand.  “If I stay at home I will be killed, if I go out on the street I will be killed – so I might as well be killed doing something,” he said.

He went to the US troops who were just beginning to arrive in his area as a result of the surge and offered to help pick up garbage (a favorite hiding place for IED’s), repair the sidewalks and get the sewage system running again.   He got some grants from the US to bring in garbage trucks, and soon the former heart surgeon had become a local contractor for garbage collection and construction.  “I love garbage,” he says – not only did his trucks clean up the streets, but it provided plenty of jobs for young men who might otherwise be tempted into the insurgency.   It was just the first step to cleaning up the neighborhood, but after four years of no garbage collection it was a very welcome initiative for the locals.  As they saw their neighborhood improving, they became better disposed to the US soldiers and began passing on information about where the Al Qaeda fighters were hiding and where the IEDs were being placed.

Now Dr Moayad’s part of Dora is quite peaceful – the US military unit based there haven’t been attacked since last September.  Shops are opening up and people were happy to stop and chat to us in the street, even after dark.  It is quite a long journey from heart surgery to garbage collection.  But as he says, “if you don’t change in life, you won’t get anywhere.”  Now he has got a profitable little contracting company going, his next idea - to open a chain of restaurants in Dora.  And also a private hospital.  He is, after all, a doctor.

March 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

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Posted by: Denise from Colorado | Mar 5, 2008 1:09:02 PM

Posted by: Dianne from Danbury | Mar 6, 2008 9:42:45 AM

Posted by: Hydn | Mar 10, 2008 1:20:04 AM

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