Learning to cope with lifelong scars

BAGHDAD: For generations to come, Iraqis will have to cope with the physical and mental scars of tens of thousands of people severely injured in the violence of the past four years.

They include thousands of amputees, many of them children.

The date, time and place that changed Ali Abdullah's life is etched in his memory.

It was November 24, 2005. A Thursday morning. He was 13.
Ali's father runs a parking lot south of Baghdad. On that day, he had agreed to let his only son open the business by himself for the first time. It was a proud moment.

In the middle of the morning he stepped out for breakfast just as a car bomb exploded nearby. Shrapnel destroyed one of his legs and an eye, and peppered his chest with wounds.

Ali told his story while waiting for a new artificial leg to be fitted at the Baghdad Artificial Limbs Centre, one of the Iraqi capital's two main prosthetics clinics.

"I came here to replace the old one because it became too small and I limp when I walk," he said.

The Baghdad centre alone has registered 2,700 amputees since 2003. The cost of looking after them is high - especially in the case of children, who will need to replace prosthetic limbs regularly as they grow.

"We mostly care for children. We try to provide them with the limb as soon as possible. We like to help them to return to school, to regain a normal life," said Qassim Mohammed, the centre's deputy director.
Besides the physical cost, there is a huge psychological toll.

"Some of them come here in despair, but we try to plant hope in them, because 50 percent of therapy is psychological," said Hussein Majeed, one of about 20 technicians in the centre's workshop, where the prosthetics are built using old machine tools, plaster casts, plastic and glue.

Saad Al Shaboutt, 65, said he now felt able to cope, two years after losing his leg to a bomb at Baghdad's Shorja market.

"I reached the point when I wanted to commit suicide, but I am better now," he said in the centre's waiting room.

"I am a manager at Iraqi Airways. I was about to be transferred to be the head of our office in Cairo, but I cancelled the transfer. Without a leg, how could I go?" he said.

Even doctors become emotionally involved. Sadiq Ali, a psychotherapist at the centre who helps counsel victims to cope with a future of disability, recalled a young man he treated two months ago who had lost all four limbs.

Wounded victims often need advanced reconstructive surgery. Yet Iraq has experienced a brain drain of medical specialists fleeing in fear after doctors were targeted by insurgents or kidnap and extortion gangs.

"I used to have 10 anaesthesiologists, now I have four," said one of Baghdad's leading reconstructive surgeons. His hospital is able to perform only about 10 operations a week, down from 14-15 a week before the war, he said.