Saving A Boy: Gift Of Life

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
ABC
October 15, 2008

World News With Charles Gibson (ABC), 6:30 PM
CHARLES GIBSON: U.S. Special Forces carry out some of the military’s riskiest operations. Their work often is secretive. They rarely give interviews. But one Special Ops unit made an exception so we could tell the story of a different kind of mission – one that gave an Iraqi boy the gift of life. The troops ask that we not reveal their identities. That’s all they asked.
ABC’s John Hendren is in Iraq.
JOHN HENDREN: Special Forces troops are best known for training foreign armies and kicking down doors in search of insurgents, which is what one Special Forces team was doing in a village outside of Tikrit when they met this sheikh, who introduced them to little Ibrahim. The ten-year-old’s bloated condition had doctors baffled. They diagnosed him wrongly with liver disease.
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: Looked like he had a watermelon hidden under his shirt. It’s unbelievable.
HENDREN: The Special Forces medics found the trouble Iraqi doctors had missed: Ibrahim’s heart had swollen to several times its normal size.
So this is his heart?
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: Mm-hmm.
HENDREN: Doctors later found a hole in his heart that leaked blood and fluid.
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: He would have died. No doubt in my mind.
HENDREN: This Special Forces team member has witnessed the ugly side of life and death in a war zone, but he’s also a father. Ibrahim got to him.
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: The children are the only real true innocents in this whole situation. When we see the opportunity to help a child, we take it.
HENDREN: Medics are often asked for routine medical advice.
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: Stop smoking, man. It’s going to kill you.
HENDREN: But Ibrahim’s case was rare and serious. So the Special Forces team took little Ibrahim here, to the Kurdish city of Sulimaniya and the only hospital in Iraq that could perform the procedure.
DR. ASUL FAIKH SAL (PH): General condition is very good.
HENDREN: Dr. Asul Faikh Sal operated, then and there, closing the hole in Ibrahim’s heart and draining a startling three gallon of blood and fluid.
SPECIAL OPS SOLDIER: He doesn’t even look like the same boy. He is completely happy.
HENDREN: “I was worried he was going to die soon,” Ibrahim’s father says, “but thank God, he’s now getting much better.”
What do you want to be when you grow up?
IBRAHIM: Doctor.
HENDREN: Ibrahim now says he wants to save other people, as the Special Forces medics saved him.
You feel good?
HENDREN: John Hendren, ABC News, Tikrit, Iraq.
GIBSON: The emphasis there on “Special” Forces, and we’ll be back in a minute.
 
Back
Top