Bronx hosp to perform free heart ops for Iraqi kids

'It's above our imagination what people are doing to help us'

BY RAFAEL D. FRANKEL in Amman, Jordan
and PAUL H.B. SHIN in New York
DAILY NEWS WRITERS

A group of desperately ill Iraqi children who won't make it to adulthood without heart surgeries are en route to New York today for the lifesaving operations.

Their remarkable journey from despair to hope will take the children from a war-torn country in dire need of expert medical care to the charitable hands of surgeons at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

"It's above our imagination what people are doing to help us," said Saleh Abed, father of 14-year-old Assad, whose congenital heart defect has so stunted his growth that even at 14, his legs dangle from his chair.

"We can't believe people like this exist," Assad's father said yesterday after he and four other kids and their dads made the treacherous crossing to Amman, Jordan, where they are to get a flight to Kennedy Airport. They will arrive in New York tomorrow.

Assad was honest about his trepidations. "I can say I'm brave, but when it comes to surgery I'm a coward," said the boy who has lived with war for the past three years.

The operations for the five kids, four boys and one girl ages 7 to 14, was sponsored by the Gift of Life, a Long Island-based charity.

Unfortunately, two of the children may have to stay behind, one due to problems obtaining a visa and another because he may be too frail for the long flight, officials said.

The kids' fathers expressed overwhelming gratitude to the charity, as well as U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Marikay Satryano and Iraqi businesswoman May Hashim, who helped arrange the trip.

Despite their gratitude, all but one of the dads kept the trip to the U.S. a secret from everyone except their immediate families and ordered them to keep quiet about it.

"We're afraid to be targeted" by anti-American insurgents, said Abed, a policeman in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad.

Ali Abed-Ali, 14, suffers from a heart defect that no doctor in Iraq could treat, and last summer, his father, Hussein, had become desperate.

"I couldn't find help anywhere," he said, glancing at his son. "Even our family said it was pointless to keep on searching and spending money."

But then they got a phone call from the Iraqi Assistance Center, an American-government sponsored organization based in Baghdad, telling him Ali was among a pool of 200 children being considered for fully funded heart surgery at Montefiore.

After two medical screenings, Abed-Ali said the desperation had turned into a belief that the dream of his son growing up "could come true."

Abed-Ali was still waiting for a U.S. travel visa yesterday.

"I believe none of the children would live into adulthood without repair," said Dr. Samuel Weinstein, the pediatric cardio-thoracic surgeon who will be operating on the kids next week.

"Technically, I'm very confident that our team here will be able to take care of everything that they're confronted with," Weinstein said. But the fact that the children have lived with these conditions untreated for so long could complicate things.

"We just want to give these kids the opportunity of life that they otherwise would not have," said Bill Currie, a board member at the Gift of Life, which has saved about 8,000 sick children in 30 years.

©2005 The New York Daily News