| ALI ISMAEL ABBAS: COLLATERAL DAMAGE |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, April 28 2003 |
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| BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The images of the young boy with no arms lying in a hospital bed in Baghdad with his torso burned beyond belief have traveled the world. But you don't get the real impact of his plight until you meet him and talk to him. Until you see what was left of his home after a bomb fell from the sky and, in an instant, changed his life.
I met Ali Ismael Abbas in a Kuwaiti hospital on my way to Baghdad to cover the war. I was impressed by his demeanor. A boy who has gone through such a traumatic experience was able to articulate his feelings and his thoughts with much clarity and purpose.
Dr. Sabreen Alzamel translated my questions to the young boy and held back tears when he began to answer. "How is he feeling?" I asked.
"He wants his arms back," she told me. "He is requesting from the Americans to visit Mecca and the Mosque of the prophet Mohammed." Ali asked for whatever he lost to be replaced. He wants his house and his father's car. He wants his arms to be able to work and support his five sisters, who miraculously survived the bombing.
What can never be replaced is the loss of his mother, father and brother. On March 30, a U.S. rocket hit his home. The intended target could very well have been an Iraqi military vehicle stationed in an open field less than a mile away. But the bomb missed and instead destroyed five houses, killing 16 members of Ali's family.
In the rubble of his home in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad, I found remnants of his shattered childhood: his schoolbooks and his Koran. I met his sisters, who are staying with an aunt until they are able to put the pieces of their lives back together. The girls, ages 6 through 19, have not spoken or slept in days. They were dug up from underneath the rubble after their house was hit.
But as dramatic as their experience has been, they are among the lucky ones. The unofficial figure for Iraqi civilian casualties -- or collateral damage, as the military refers to it -- is 1,250. Inside Iraq, it is estimated by different sources that around 5,000 are dead and thousands more are injured. Many are still lying in Iraqi hospitals without the proper hygiene or medicine to cure their wounds.
The press coverage is what actually helped Ali. A man who read his story in an Australian newspaper contacted the editors to offer help for the young boy. The paper's correspondent in Baghdad, Peter Wilson, with translator Stewart Innes, made the necessary contacts to have the boy transferred to a place where he could get proper medical attention. After contacting a hospital in Kuwait, U.S. troops escorted an ambulance from a hospital in Saddam City to a Black Hawk medivac chopper that would transport him to Kuwait.
Ali's destiny is as uncertain as the future of his country after the war. But a combination of medical science and philanthropy will help him and his sisters put their lives back together. Doctors in Kuwait are making the necessary arrangements to give him prosthetic arms to replace his own. And a good Samaritan donated money to buy him land and build a home in the same neighborhood where he once lived.
Hopefully Ali's story will be considered as much a symbol of this war as the images of Saddam Hussein's toppled statue. |
