An Important Thank You
Bob Woodruff and his crew head to Syria to track down Omar.
June 12, 2007 — -- More than a million Iraqis have fled to Syria since the war began, but on my first night in Damascus a few weeks ago, I set out to find one man -- Omar, the man who'd helped save my life.
Omar is a 23-year-old Iraqi who was working as an interpreter with the U.S. Army when I was injured in Iraq a year and a half ago, and he was with me in the tank when our vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device.
The soldiers who were with us that day say if it wasn't for Omar, who administered my immediate first aid, I probably would not have survived. "It was Omar who said, 'No, no we can get him out of here,'" recalled Maj. Mike Jason.
A year and a half later, I finally had the chance to thank Omar in person. For the first time since the attack, I headed back to the Middle East with Doug Vogt and Magnus Macedo, the same team that was with me last January.
Omar was a teenager in military school when the war began, but he and his classmates were released early to join the Iraqi army. Fluent in English, he ended up finding work with the U.S. Army as a translator.
He had been working with them for three years when we first met in January 2006 while I was in Iraq to report on the hand over of power to the Iraqi troops. When our team made a last-minute decision to join an Iraqi patrol, an American officer sent Omar with us in case anything went wrong.
We were lucky to have him. In the aftermath of the explosion, Omar was the one to leap into action and bandage my wounds, while also talking to my crew to keep them calm. Having been through 36 previous IED attacks, he knew exactly what to do.
But soon after putting me on a medevac flight out of Iraq, Omar decided he had had enough. His family was receiving threats because of his work with the U.S. Army, and they had been chased from neighborhood to neighborhood. His brother was shot in the leg in an assassination attempt.
"I became like a curse on my family," said Omar. So he left his job with the U.S. Army and escaped to Holland with a fake visa, but when he tried to apply for refugee status, he was sent back to Iraq. "The police came and took me and put me on a plane," he said.
