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| Iraq |
| For Iraqis, a Haven of Healing |
| 2008-02-09 |
| It's not entirely fair to call it WaPo hand-wringing; what I read was just the horrible cost of war. On the third floor of the Amman Palace hotel, above a city block crowded with appliance dealers and video-game vendors, six Iraqi children formed a semicircle around their therapist and practiced how to breathe. To the right of the therapist sat Abdullah, a 7-year-old boy missing his left foot and left eye. The afternoon sun slanted across his face, which once had been so erased his father failed to recognize it and now was a mottled mask of flesh grafted from his back. Two boys wore leg casts. A third had a burnt face. Three of the children sat in wheelchairs. Zaineb, an 11-year-old girl who could barely move her crippled legs, wore a black wool cap over her broken skull. "The pain will be there," the therapist said. "But if we focus on it, that will only make us feel worse." Five years of war have disfigured the people of Iraq, hobbling and maiming many thousands of them. There are no definitive counts. But Health Minister Salih al-Hasnawi said the number of wounded Iraqi civilians is "of course" higher than the estimated 151,000 who died from violence in the first three years of the war, the figure given in a recent survey by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government. "For any explosion, it is five to one, or seven to one, wounded to dead," Hasnawi said. About 50 of these wounded Iraqis have been living in the Amman Palace hotel, while half that number are in the Jordan Red Crescent hospital up the hill. Dozens more, limbless and broken, arrive in Amman each month asking to be remade. They stay an average of 53 days, sometimes more than a year, attended by a team of orthopedic, plastic and maxillofacial surgeons from the Geneva-based Doctors Without Borders organization. "Fear is legitimate. It's all right to be afraid, but we must not let it wear us out," the therapist said. The lives these people knew in Iraq changed in a moment, with no time for them to react. The young boy standing at his grandfather's funeral when the suicide car bomb exploded. Neighborhood kids playing soccer when a mortar shell landed among them. A hotel clerk hailing a taxi when a bullet passed through his thigh. Now they have nothing but time: for the melted gums and charred skin, the hair implants and the plastic legs, septicemia and osteomyelitis, antibiotic resistance and opiate addictions. More at link, but I get the picture. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #2 tw nailed it, and if I might take the liberty, I am borrowing part of what she posted as a retort to a liberal handwringer out there. |
| Posted by: Omung Squank9908 2008-02-09 16:49 |
| #1 If Al Qaeda in Iraq had not made and set off the bombs, these children would not have been injured. Had Saddam Hussein not made his plans to fight the invasion based on a terror war after losing, these children would not have been injured. Had the Shiite Sadrites and the Badrites not made covert war and torture their policy, with the avid support of the mullahcracy in Iran, these children would not have been injured. I'm with the gentleman quoted yesterday about the Navy SEALS who died getting the evil men who put suicide vests on two retarded women, sent them into the Baghdad pet market, and blew them up: we are fighting evil, and if you can't tell the difference, or can and refuse to support what we do, please go to Hell. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-02-09 12:46 |