War is hell; just ask a child

The Iraqi boy, who should have been dead according to his doctor, didn’t look too bad, considering. He was smiling as he lay in his bed at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, on the mend nine months after having his skull blown open by an improvised explosive device in Baghdad.

Hashim Zareef, 10, doesn’t like to think about that day in January. When his mother, Zahiraa, started telling me the story, he stuck his finger in his ear and turned onto his side.

“We were going to see my father-in-law to have dinner together,” the boy’s mother said through an interpreter. They did this every two weeks, she said, a family tradition that included her husband, Hashim, and his two younger siblings.

A simple thing like that—a Saturday drive through town—is a calculated risk in Baghdad, and Zahiraa said she and her family were always aware of that.

“We’re living in fear all the time,” she said, so if she had to go, say, to the market, she would arrange to go without the kids. “If someone’s going to die, I’ll die by myself.”

After dinner with the relative, she and her husband were driving home when they passed a parked car that apparently concealed the improvised bomb. As they approached, it exploded and their own car burst into flames. Hashim was the most seriously injured, by far.

“Is he alive?” the boy’s mother screamed as her husband cradled Hashim’s limp body.

The boy was unconscious when he was rushed to the hospital, burned and bleeding from the gash to his head.

“He was unconscious for 55 days,” said his mother.

Hamish was saved by doctors working in the Green Zone. Despite losing part of his skull and suffering a brain injury, he was able to return to fourth grade and take tests using his left hand; his right side was weakened by neurological damage.

But by summer, Hashim had grown desperately ill, and at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Dr. Jeffrey Hammoudeh took urgent phone calls from Green Zone doctors asking if he could help arrange to get Hashim out of Baghdad for help. A bone fragment from the blast was embedded in his brain, and a potentially deadly infection was festering.

Hammoudeh, born in the Palestinian town of Ramallah in the West Bank, is a doctor here because his parents fled to Jordan and then the U.S. as refugees from the war-torn region. They were teachers who worked as grocers in Chicago to give Hammoudeh a shot at a better life than theirs.

“I could be dead in the streets of Ramallah,” Hammoudeh, 40, said of the randomness of violence and the hunger for civility, relative safety and opportunity.

I wrote about Hammoudeh, a reconstructive surgeon, a year ago, after he helped treat a badly burned 4-year-old girl brought here from Zimbabwe. Since then, Hammoudeh has been researching ways to cut through red tape and help more of the world’s suffering children.

With his wife, Amel Najjar, who majored in international studies at UC San Diego, he established the Children of War Foundation. The nonprofit’s website, https://www.cowf.org, quotes Gandhi: “If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.”

Children of War and another nonprofit called Mending Kids International, managed to get Hashim out of Iraq and here to the U.S., where Hammoudeh and neurosurgeon Gordon McComb performed life-saving surgery on Sept. 15. Hashim will be in L.A. for six months and needs two more surgeries to attach a titanium plate over the hole in his skull and to treat his burns.

Hammoudeh wondered if the IED that hit Hashim was intended for Americans. If so, he said, it’s worth noting that American military doctors saved Hashim and then fought to get him the help they couldn’t provide. At the hospital in Los Angeles, the boy has been cared for by “whites, blacks, browns,” and the host family for the young Muslim is Christian.

Hashim’s mother said that she welcomed the U.S.-backed ouster of Saddam Hussein but that the battle to fill the void is so relentlessly violent, she has lost hope for her country.

Who planted and triggered the bomb that nearly killed Hashim? Zahiraa shrugged when I asked. There’s just no explaining that kind of chaos, hatred and insanity. She said it could have been any number of competing groups that spread mayhem and fear in Iraq as the country stumbles along without effective leadership.

Zahiraa is a college-educated accountant and her husband an engineer, and if they can find a way, they will leave Iraq for good — just as Dr. Hammoudeh’s parents left the Middle East — so their children have a chance at a life not lived in fear.

As for Hashim, he’d rather not think about the upheaval that awaits him. When I asked if he knew what he wants to do when he grows up, he smiled.

“I want to be a doctor,” he said, “to help kids.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com