His Sacrifice Helped Bridge Iraq’s Sectarian Differences, for a While

In deeply troubled Iraq, it’s hard to find a hero who straddles the sectarian divide. Othman Ali Ubeydi was one.

The Sunni Arab high school student drowned rescuing Shiite Muslim pilgrims who jumped off a bridge into the Tigris River to escape a stampede started by rumors of a suicide bomber.

Ubeydi’s actions brought him instant hero status and provided a glimmer of hope to a country that often seems close to civil war.

But three months later, in this capital that wakes up daily to explosions, gunfire and the latest toll in sectarian killings, the memory of 18-year-old Ubeydi’s bravery has faded and even become fodder for a macabre joke.

“So much happens in Iraq every day that it’s not difficult to forget him and what he has done,” said Naseer Ani of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group. “But we must not, because we can use what he has done to frustrate those who are trying so hard to divide us.”

The young Ubeydi was not the only Sunni from the Adhamiya district who rushed to the rescue of the pilgrims during the Aug. 31 stampede. But his death made him a national icon, burnished by the fact that he lived in a Baghdad stronghold of opposition to the Shiite-dominated government.

“Allah created Othman specially for that day,” Ubeydi’s father, Ali Abdul Hafez Ubeydi. “He died so that Sunnis and Shiites can be united in Iraq.”

Senior politicians sent representatives to his funeral and many promised his family financial aid. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad likened him to the New York City firefighters who died trying to rescue people on Sept. 11.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite, received the family at his office. Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr invited Ubeydi’s father to his home in the holy city of Najaf and later sent him a pistol, a prized gift among Iraqi men.

Pictures of Ubeydi flanked by two famous Sunni and Shiite mosques grace many walls and shop windows in Adhamiya and in the Shiite district of Kadhimiya.

Ubeydi’s bed in the room he shared with two of the 25 extended family members living in the house has been turned into something of a shrine. A pair of jeans and two of his sweatshirts are neatly spread across the bed, along with pink and red plastic flowers. There are photos of him diving into the Tigris, at school with classmates and with friends posing outside the Kadhimiya mosque the week he died.

Witnesses said Ubeydi pulled seven pilgrims to shore, then drowned trying to save a woman who dragged him down.

Now a joke is going around that plays on his name, Othman, a 7th century caliph disliked by Shiites. Supposedly, the joke goes, when the woman heard the young man’s name she dragged him and herself down to their deaths.

Ubeydi had ambitions to become an engineer but had grown despondent, said his mother, Najla Mohammed Abdul-Jabar.