Riyadh: A team of doctors and specialists have started a 11-hour surgery to separate a set of Iraqi conjoined twins— Ali and Omer at King Abdullah Specialized Children’s Hospital (KASCH) in Riyadh on Thursday, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
The surgery comes in implementation of the directives of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and is supervised by Dr Abdullah Al-Rabeeah.
The surgery will see 27 doctors, specialists and nursing staff attempt to separate the twins from the lower chest and abdomen across six surgical phases that is expected to take 11 hours.
Dr Al-Rabeeah noted that, “the success rate of the operation is 70 per cent because the twins are attached to the lower chest and abdomen, and that they share the liver, bile ducts, and intestines.”
It is worth mentioning that the Iraqi conjoined twins, Omer and Ali, arrived in Riyadh in September 2022 with their parents.
This surgery is the fifth case of separating conjoined twins from Iraq, and it is the 54th case within the Saudi program for separating conjoined twins since 1990, and the program has studied and evaluated 127 cases from 23 countries.
