Kara and Zara Rasheed are joined just above the hip. Each baby has her own heart, lungs and liver, but they have only three kidneys and share a lower intestine. Only one pair of legs is working.
Dr Zaid Jaafar said the Fatima al-Zahra hospital did not have the facilities to save the twins. An operation to separate them would probably have to be performed abroad, he said. “I think one of them has a good chance to live,” he added. “The other has only a low chance.”
Majheda Rasheed, 20, the mother, agreed that the twins had to be moved from the hospital, which was previously known as the “Saddam hospital for delivery”.
“I am begging the world to find a solution for my young babies,” she said. “That would be worth all the pain I’ve had. I’m asking all countries to help me. I hate to see them like this while I cannot do anything for them.”
She and her husband Hayder, 25, already have a son, Ali, who is 18 months old. Scans taken at the hospital had revealed Rasheed was expecting twins, but doctors had not realised the complications. They were delivered by caesarean section.
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“I’d hoped for a boy and a girl,” said Rasheed.
Ahmed Bassan, another doctor at the hospital, said yesterday that the twins were “stable now and breathing okay”.
The hospital is in the impoverished and troubled Sadr City area but is nonetheless one of the best in the Iraqi capital. It was not bombed or badly looted during the war, but is dirty, overcrowded and has few medicines.
The twins were in a rickety bed yesterday, covered only by a thin blanket. Even before the 2003 invasion, the Iraqi health service struggled to perform the complicated surgery necessary to separate Siamese twins.
On a previous occasion Siamese twins born in Iraq were operated on in Dubai. Rashid and Hamdan Ghazi were saved in 2002, after the intervention of the crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Doctors from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London helped in the operation on the infants.
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The last time Siamese twins were taken out of the region was in 2003 when Ladan and Laleh Bijani, 29-year-old Iranians, were flown to Singapore for a 53-hour operation. Both women later died.
Local charities and women’s groups visited the Rasheed twins yesterday to offer help and investigate ways of sending them abroad.