It was spring 2007 in northern Iraq when 6-year-old Saja Saleem raced home from school with the good news about her excellent grades, hoping to receive the gift her father had promised her.
“All of a sudden, I found myself spinning into the air with fire trailing from my school uniform after a loud boom,” Saleem, now 17, recounted.
Saleem lost her eyesight, right arm and an ear in the explosion, set off by a roadside bomb. Months later, her disfiguring injuries forced her to drop out of school after other students complained about her “scary face.”
Feeling helpless, Saleem recently turned to social media to find help.
Eventually, her appeal captured the attention of a surgeon who offered free treatment.
Others have also reached out on social media. Emotional videos and photographs of Iraqis with war wounds and disabilities have overwhelmed social media platforms, mainly Facebook, widely used in Iraq.
The widespread violence unleashed by the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein and the 2014-17 battle against the Islamic State group has wounded hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Many are maimed and scarred, their suffering lingering long after the violence subsides.
Poor medical services, scarcity of specialized staff and medical centers, and poverty have exacerbated the suffering. Those who cannot obtain treatment at state-run hospitals and cannot afford private clinics are looking to social media platforms to make appeals.
Requests are posted on the personal Facebook pages of patients or on the pages of aid organizations and public figures with tens of thousands of followers. Messages are also distributed on platforms like WhatsApp and Viber.
Saleem and her family recall the explosion that upended her life, and the years that followed as they struggled financially to get her treatment. Her mother, Khawla Omar Hussein, remembers her daughter’s screams when she first regained consciousness and realized she had lost her right arm and ear.
“She woke up screaming, crying: ‘Mammy, mammy,’” Hussein recalled. “Then she asked: ‘Why can’t I see and why is everything dark?’”
They told her it was the bandages over her eyes and that she would see after they were removed. When that day came, the doctors told her she had lost both eyes.
After the state-run hospital couldn’t go beyond the necessary treatment to save her life, Saleem’s family looked for plastic and reconstructive surgery for her at a private clinic, but they couldn’t afford the doctor’s $7,500 fee.
Then, late last year, her mother made an appeal, posting photographs of Saleem and details about her ordeal in a public group on Viber.
Days later, Baghdad-based Dr. Abbas al-Sahan, one of Iraq’s best plastic surgeons, offered to do free surgeries.
Since January, Saleem has undergone four surgeries — first so her face could accommodate the two glass eyes, or ocular prostheses, then a procedure to reduce some of the scars. She also had a surgery to adjust to a prosthetic arm and is due to have plastic surgery to reconstruct her missing ear, al-Sahan said.
Sinan Salaheddin is an Associated Press writer.
0 Comments