For Mutilated Hussein Foe, Surgery Brings New Hope

LONDON, Dec. 13 -- Khalid Jameel, a 33-year-old Iraqi taxi driver, couldn't stop smiling Tuesday. For the first time since 1994, he had a right ear.

Jameel said he, like hundreds of other Iraqis, had his ear sliced off as a painful and humiliating punishment for challenging the government of Saddam Hussein. But on Dec. 3, a British plastic surgeon and other doctors built a new ear with cartilage from his rib and tissue from his scalp, as part of a new campaign by British and Iraqi doctors to erase one of the most brutal reminders of the ruthlessness of that era.

"I don't know if it was a surgeon or one of Saddam's henchmen," said Jameel, describing the September day in 1994 when he was dragged from his home in the southern city of Basra and taken to a hospital, where he woke up later with one ear.

Speaking to reporters here Tuesday, he said the mutilation made him feel "unacceptable" to society and "always nervous and depressed."

"I have such gratitude," he said, for the reconstruction of his ear. "A smile is back on my face."

Suad Al-Saffar, an Iraqi doctor who works for the Denmark-based International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, said there were more than 400 victims of ear amputation in Basra and estimated that there may be as many as 1,600 throughout Iraq. Other human rights groups have put the number higher.

Al-Saffar said many Iraqi men who refused to join the army or deserted it under Hussein were arrested and had their right ears cut off, as a highly visible marker that was meant to ostracize them from society. Sometimes the amputation was done by a doctor with anesthesia and sometimes by an unskilled jailer who bungled it, causing death, she said.

The new efforts to erase those scars is a way to help ordinary Iraqis, and the country, move forward, Al-Saffar said.

For the past several weeks, Iraqi doctors have been undergoing training by British plastic surgeons and other specialists; Jameel and another Iraqi were their first cases. The Iraqi doctors are now to return home to begin performing surgeries there. Al-Saffar said the rehabilitation project aims also to address the psychological scars of doctors forced to perform the amputations.

David Ross, a British plastic surgeon who operated on Jameel this month, said the surgery would cost about $25,000 in London. But the doctors and others are donating their services, he said, and Al-Saffar's group is raising money for the project to continue in Iraq.

Jameel, his head still wrapped in gauze 10 days after surgery at the London Clinic, said he was punished for refusing to join the army and for too openly criticizing the Hussein government. For that, he said, he lost his ear at age 23 and served four years in prison.

He said he has come a long way from "hating myself" because of the disfigurement. He said that times are still "not very good" in Iraq but that people have more freedom than during Hussein's rule. For one thing, he said, he was free to travel to London.