Dr Cherian with some of the Iraqi children he operated on last year. (PTI file picture)

Thiruvananthapuram, June 6: They were born in Kirkuk, but they found a lifeline in Kerala.

Three Iraqi children, who till a while ago had holes in their hearts, are doing fine after surgery at a super speciality centre in a village in Kottayam district.

Brothers Together, an international charity organisation, had spotted the “blue babies” ? their nail-beds and lips had turned blue because of impure blood in their arteries.

Chero Juma Ismail, 2, Rekar Ahmed, 7, and Yahya Esam, 4, hail from Kirkuk in Iraq and belong to the sub-nationality of Kurds, subjected to years of persecution during the dictatorial regime of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

All three children had large holes in their hearts and suffered from a debilitating condition. They could neither walk nor run because of insufficient supply of oxygen in their blood. They would gasp for breath at the slightest exertion and collapse if they strained further.

Brothers Together referred them to Dr Cherian, the chief executive officer of Frontier Lifeline, who had last year operated on 20 Iraqi children at his International Centre for Cardio Thoracic and Vascular Diseases, Chennai.

Chero, Rekar and Yahya began their journey from Kirkuk. They travelled to Baghdad and then to Amman by car and took the Qatar Airways flight via Doha for Thiruvananthapuram. Berno Heitmann, a German translator studying Arabic in Iraq, also came along.

Chero had a double outlet from the ventricle and shrunken pulmonary artery while Rekar suffered from a combination of four congenital defects known as ventricular septal defect. Yahya had a defective ventricle.

They landed at St Gregorios Hospital in Parumala village in May-end. Dr Cherian and his three-member team operated on Chero and Rekar on June 2 and Yahya went under the scalpel the next day.

Dr Jacob John at St Gregorios Hospital said the intra-cardiac repair was successful and Rekar and Yahya could go back and lead normal lives. Chero, however, will require a surgery after two years.

High-quality treatment at comparatively cheaper rates prompted Brothers Together to send the children to Dr Cherian. The operation, which costs Rs 100,000 at the centre, would be close to $200,000 in the West.

“This is a very small gesture. I thank God for having given me an opportunity to extend a helping hand to the future of Iraq, when it is undergoing the rebuilding process. The satisfaction and delight I got on seeing the smiles on faces of the 20 children from Iraq last year multiplies when I see another three children getting operated at Parumala village in Kerala,” said Dr Cherian.

Out of hospital in another week, the children will be holidaying at the Kumarakom backwaters in Kottayam, courtesy an invitation from Mathew Alex Vellapally to the families for a three-day stay at his resort, Backwater Ripples.

Chero’s father Juma Ismail said: “God willing, we’ll come back to this beautiful place two years later for the next surgery, which will make my daughter a perfect child.”