Iraqi captain to receive free care

A renowned Atlanta medical center has agreed to treat without charge a decorated Iraqi army captain paralyzed in an insurgent attack during home leave Christmas Day.

The case of Capt. Furat, chronicled in The Washington Times, has been taken up by U.S. Army officers who consider him a hero and by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, who is working to clear bureaucratic hurdles so that the Iraqi soldier can come to the United States for treatment.

Officials from Atlanta’s Shepherd Center said they would treat the 28-year-old captain pro bono in response to a personal appeal Tuesday by U.S. Army officers from two battalions attached to Capt. Furat’s unit in Iraq’s Diyala province.

Capt. Furat — his real name is being withheld to protect his family in Iraq — wept upon hearing the news.

“Really, I don’t know how to thank everybody for this,” he said in a telephone interview from his hospital bed at the giant U.S. Air Force field hospital in Balad, Iraq.

Mr. Frist, a surgeon himself, is trying to clear the remaining hurdles to allow Capt. Furat to go to Georgia for treatment.

“When I heard about [Capt. Furat], I was naturally concerned about the health and future of this valiant young Iraqi officer who fought so bravely alongside our forces,” Mr. Frist said of his decision to contact the Pentagon on the captain’s behalf.

“If a hospital in Atlanta is willing to provide him the treatment he so desperately needs, then I wanted to help facilitate his transfer and transport from Iraq to the U.S. where he can receive that care,” the senator added.

Capt. Furat needs clearance from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to fly on military aircraft and must obtain a visa from the State Department to enter the United States.

The Iraqi army captain has been paralyzed from the waist down since a bullet severed his spinal cord when he was ambushed by insurgents during a visit home Christmas Day.

A former special forces officer in Saddam Hussein’s military who battled U.S. troops in Baghdad during the 2003 war, Capt. Furat joined the “Tiger Battalion” of Iraq’s fledgling new army in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. He won the admiration and respect of his American counterparts for his courage under fire.

But his service also made him a particular target of Iraq’s deadly insurgency, and his friends and family fear he could be in danger if released from the U.S. facility.

A delegation of the captain’s U.S. Army comrades-in-arms met with Shepherd Center officials Tuesday to press the cause of the man they sometimes referred to as “Rambo.”

It didn’t take much to convince the staff at the facility, one of the nation’s best-known catastrophic care centers specializing in spinal cord injuries.

“He sounds like a very deserving young man,” said James Shepherd, for whom the center was named, in e-mail last week.

Mr. Shepherd and other senior officials of the center said in a Jan. 31 letter they were “convinced that we will be able to make a significant difference in the functional outcome for Captain Furat.”

Marcie Roth, head of the Bethesda-based National Spinal Cord Injury Association, has also taken an interest in the case.

She called the Atlanta facility “one of the world’s finest spinal cord injury centers” that could allow the wounded captain to live a life “rich in opportunity and promise.”

Capt. Furat still faces a rigorous program of rehabilitation. He was shot 12 times and must learn to use a wheelchair. A bullet shattered his right forearm and U.S. doctors removed a damaged kidney in the days after the attack.

Still, he remains a fierce patriot of his struggling homeland, and despite his wounds was able to supply enough information after the attack to lead Iraqi soldiers to arrest two men reputedly involved in the action.

He said from his hospital bed last month that his dream now is to stand once again on his own legs. And when he can stand, he said, he will fight.

“I’ll go anywhere — Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran — just tell me.”

• David R. Sands and Charles Hurt contributed to this report.