OK, enough of the bad news in Iraq. What’s the good news?

Americans help Iraqis with severed hands

While the press is having a feeding frenzy over the ugly photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse…we would all do well to spend some time dealing with a story that the media avoids.  Time that we see some of what the “good guys” are doing in Iraq.

– Basim Salman Al Fadhly never thought the day would come – but it did this past week when he walked into a building on the south side of Houston to get fitted for a new right hand.

He had lived with the shame of losing his right hand for almost 10 years. No one in Iraq could help him, and he lost all hope until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime last year.

But on Monday, Al Fadhly and six other Baghdad merchants will walk out of a Houston prosthetics clinic with fully functioning hands for the first time since the mid-1990s, when Saddam Hussein’s government hacked off their natural hands…

Saddam’s Punishment

In 1995, Saddam’s secret police pulled Al Fadhly and other Baghdad merchants from their beds in the middle of the night and accused them of dealing in foreign currency.

Their trials lasted five minutes, and all were convicted. The sentence was that their right hands were to be cut off, crosses would be carved in their foreheads and they would serve a year in Abu Ghraib prison.

Abu Ghraib – now known as the site where the American military abused Iraqi prisoners – once held 25,000 prisoners who were considered enemies of Saddam Hussein, including Al Fadhly and the other merchants who were being blamed for the bad economy.

Their story was well known in Baghdad, but not widely know outside of Iraq until the fall of Saddam a year ago.

Secret Video

The story would have ended there without Don North, a documentary filmmaker who stumbled onto it while in Iraq last year.

What North found started a chain of events that brought hope to the men who lost their hands.

“I met a filmmaker in Baghdad who had a copy of this incredible video,” North said. “One night Saddam’s secret police came to him and asked him to make 10 copies of a tape. He secretly recorded an 11th copy and hid it.”

The tape showed the preparations for surgery, and the doctor amputating the right hands. It can be painful to watch, to see the severed hands lying on the operating tables.

“The brutality of what I saw on this tape was overwhelming,” North said. “That this could be done with such cold-blooded deliberation was frightening.”

American Help

North got help for the men from a contractor from Houston who referred him to Marvin Zindler, the consumer advocate for KTRK-TV, the ABC-owned station in Houston.

Zindler and his producer, Lori Reingold, were able to use their contacts to cut the red tape to get help for the merchants.

Continental Airlines flew the men to Houston.

Dr. Joe Agris and Dr. Fred Kessler of Methodist Hospital of Houston provided the medical care the men needed to get ready for prosthetics.

Dynamic Prosthetics of Houston took on the daunting task of building seven prosthetic hands with the help of Otto Bock – a prosthetic manufacturer who donated the prosthetics – that would give the seven men functional hands again.

The Institute for Research and Rehabilitation is teaching the men how to use their new hands.

The generosity of so many people in the United States moves Al Fadhly and his friends to tears.

“Why they should help us, strangers, I do not know,” he said, “but their goodness I will never forget.”

Supports Iraq War

There is no doubt in Al Fadhly’s mind about the rightness of the decision to invade Iraq. He is surprised at criticism of the war – and changed mosques in Houston when one mosque leader lectured him about the American presence in Iraq.

“The coalition doesn’t need to find weapons of mass destruction of justify the war,” he said.

Holding up the stump of his right hand he continued, “Doesn’t the world community consider this an act of brutality? May this never happen to another human being again.”