On Sunday, April 6, at the Al Kindi hospital in downton Baghdad, Samia Nakhoul stumbled across the most horrific thing she had ever seen.
In the last, chaotic days of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Nakhoul, the Gulf bureau chief of Reuters, had taken to touring the hospitals daily to monitor the casualties from the blitzkrieg of American bombing that was battering the Iraqi capital.
”The hospital was in a really terrible situation,” she says. ”There were scores of casualties arriving, some said up to 100 in an hour. The nurses and doctors hadn’t been home for weeks — they were all sleeping at the hospital. I asked one of the nurses, ‘What is the worst case you have received?’ She told me, ‘Well, there’s this boy, he’s been burned.’ So I asked if I could see him. I wanted to know what ‘the worst case’ meant.”
Nakhoul was given a mask and gown by the hospital staff and led into a side room, eerily quiet in contrast to the chaos in the rest of the hospital.
Inside was a woman sitting by a low bed and, lying on a grubby blanket under a rusting metal cage, a young boy with a thick white bandage around his head. He was looking up at her silently with large, thickly lashed eyes.Both his arms were missing at the shoulder; below his chin his torso was one large weeping sore that in places had crisped to a ghastly black charcoal. ”I have covered the Lebanon war, but I had never seen anything like that,” says Nakhoul, now based in Dubai. ”I was very, very shocked and I was trying to hold myself together and not break down in front of him.”
She spent an hour talking quietly to the boy and his aunt, her photographer already in tears, and learned that he had been asleep in his home on the night of March 30 when an American missile hit his house, killing his father and pregnant mother, and 14 other members of his family. ”When I came out I started sobbing like I have never sobbed in my life. I couldn’t file the story for hours, I just sat and cried.”
Next week Ali Ismaeel Abbas will fly to the UK to be fitted for prosthetic arms and begin up to six months of physiotherapy. It is an extraordinarily happy ending for the little boy whose doctors at one point told journalists, ”It would be better if he died.”
He is now likely to have access to the best medical care for the rest of his life; when he arrives in Britain his uncle, now the boy’s legal guardian, is almost certain to accept one of the many lucrative offers for his exclusive story that have been dangled in front of him by newspapers since Ali was injured. But how did this one boy come to be feted by the world’s media, courted by international celebrities, and scrambled over by competing charities desperate to be the ones to help him? In a conflict that saw countless thousands of children horrifically injured, why Ali?
Only a few hours after Nakhoul filed her story, it was already apparent that the small boy with the beautiful face and the uncanny knack for unbearably poignant soundbites was set to become one of the iconic figures of Gulf War II, particularly in the UK. Almost all the British papers reported the boy’s heart-rending plea to Nakhoul: ”Will you help me get my arms back? If I don’t get my arms back I will commit suicide.” Within days, at least four British tabloid newspapers had launched appeals.
Meanwhile, at the Saddam City hospital, where the 11-year-old (not 12, as was widely reported) had been moved for reasons of safety, the British journalists were beating their own path to the boy’s bedside. On April 10, Ali told the London Evening Standard that he was pleased its appeal would help other children like him. The next day the Daily Mirror told him how greatly moved people in England had been by his story.
”After I did the story he had many, many journalists visiting and taking pictures and interviewing him,” says Nakhoul, ”and I think he got fed up with it, to tell you the truth. Everyone was asking him the same questions, and he had to tell the same stories over and over again.”
Nakhoul, for her part, had resolved to try to persuade the International Red Cross to help Ali, but then her own tragedy struck: on April 8 she was badly injured when an American missile was fired at the Palestine Hotel, an attack in which three journalists, including one of her Reuters colleagues, were killed. With a piece of shrapnel embedded in her brain, Nakhoul was evacuated to Kuwait. By this time doctors were openly telling the gaggle of reporters gathered around Ali’s bed that he would probably be better off dead.
Enter the man who was to prove Ali’s unlikely saviour — Peter Wilson, a reporter covering the conflict for The Australian newspaper. Initially, he says, he was reluctant to get involved with Ali. ”By the time I came across him, he was already a worldwide celebrity. I wasn’t really interested in reporting on him. I thought, if any kid doesn’t need the attention, it’s that one.”
But, after being taken on a tour of the hospital while reporting on another story (though he declined to go into Ali’s room, reasoning that it should be kept as sterile as possible), he mentioned the boy in passing in a story. Afterwards, a reader from Perth, a wealthy property developer, contacted him and offered to help. ”I said look, I’m sure he doesn’t need any help, because by then several newspapers had said they would help, the Swedish were saying they would help, the Queen of Jordan wanted to help, a number of journalists were sloping about saying they would help. I said, I’m sure something is being organised, but if you want to send some money I’ll go and see where you can send it.”
In fact, he discovered that despite the appeals in Britain and elsewhere, into which hundreds of thousands of pounds were pouring, nothing was being done to get the boy out of the hospital in which he would almost certainly die. Wilson thought he might as well use the opportunity to try to achieve something positive out of his war.
He and his translator, Stewart Innes, who lives in Kuwait, hit the phones. Within an hour they persuaded Kuwait to admit Ali to its specialist burns hospital, provided the Americans would allow them to bring him from the hospital. Ali’s doctors insisted that he would have to be airlifted if he was to survive the journey, so Wilson approached the US military, who agreed to evacuate him if he was accompanied by a relative. They spoke to Ali’s uncle, Mohammed Abd Hamzah, who agreed to go with the boy to Kuwait, though it meant leaving his job and his own family in Baghdad.
On April 15, Ali was finally moved from the hospital, in a highly twitchy handover from the hospital’s clerics and Muslim militia to a small US military convoy, a transaction choreographed and overseen by Wilson, who was the only person who had built relationships with all the parties involved.
But it was not an entirely smooth operation. ”The British press were just disgraceful, to be honest,” says Wilson. ”Ali’s room was meant to be a sterile environment — his body was just an open sore — but you had all these publicity-seeking English journalists leaning over him, putting his head next to their heads, dropping their hairs on to his body. Eventually he was saying in Arabic, ‘Keep them away from me, keep them away’.
”One [British TV journalist] was just appalling. She said, ‘No, I will not have him go out of here in an ambulance, it will kill him!’ She’d obviously decided he was their story and that she knew best. When the Americans turned up at the hospital the journalists wouldn’t get out of the room, and we couldn’t do the handover until they did, so we had to insist they kicked them out.” (He himself has still not met Ali. He doesn’t see the need.)
Newspaper claims that a personal intervention by Tony Blair was influential in Ali’s removal were scoffed at by the US military involved, says Wilson. Until now, not a single British paper has acknowledged the role the Australian played in the boy’s rescue.
By the time Ali arrived in Kuwait, a small fortune had been donated by concerned readers of British newspapers, implicitly to go to his care. The London Evening Standard, Sun and Daily Mirror between them raised a total of £725 000, split between Unicef, the British Red Cross and Save the Children (none of it has been spent directly on Ali — the papers did not claim that it would be, though it was all earmarked for use in Iraq).
The organisation that would ultimately go on to provide Ali’s rehabilitative care, meanwhile, became involved in the case only when approached by another newspaper, the London freesheet Metro. ”They had started to receive a number of phone calls and realised that people wanted to help, but they knew they couldn’t do that themselves,” says Diana Morgan, chairman of the Limbless Association. ”So they phoned us and asked if we could do something.”
The paper’s appeal for ”Ali and the limbless of Iraq” helped the association to raise a total of £280 000. ”Our chairman travelled to Kuwait with a prosthetic arm to show Ali. He is a leg amputee, and Ali was asking him to stand on his false leg and to jump on it. There’s no doubt his spirits were lifted immeasurably by our visit.”
But the Limbless Association, of which Heather Mills McCartney is vice president, was not the only charity that wanted to help Ali. In New York, Elissa Montanti, a former singer who had founded her own medical charity after adopting a Bosnian boy who had also lost both arms, had seen the footage of Ali on CNN. She flew to Kuwait in May, bringing a videotape of her son, Kenan, using the phone and playing on a GameBoy (”Ali’s eyes opened wide when he saw I had brought him a GameBoy!”), and a letter from the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (”I asked Ali’s doctor what I could bring, and he said something from a celebrity”).
At the same time, organisations, individuals and governments in Sweden, Spain, Jordan, Germany, Canada, Greece and France, were also offering to help Ali, though for a while it looked like the Kuwaitis would want to keep him for themselves, insisting that their own burns facilities were equal or superior to anything in Europe.
Towards the end of June, Ali took his first tentative steps. His Kuwaiti doctors say he has made remarkable progress — they even believe he may escape with hardly any scars on his body after skin-grafting operations proved particuarly successful. He has befriended another Iraqi boy, 15-year-old Ahmed Mohammed Hamza, who was also flown to Kuwait after losing a leg in a separate attack. Last week Kuwait’s prime minister announced that both boys would be flown to London to be treated at the specialist prosthetics unit at the Roehampton hospital in London, under the auspices of the Limbless Association.
Nick Hillsdon, the senior prosthetist at the unit, says Ali will probably be fitted with complex electronic arms with bending elbows, wrists that swivel and an electric hand (”probably a split hook would work better functionally but culturally, and from the media point of view, I’m sure he would want an electric hand which would be more cosmetically acceptable”.) The hospital does not know exactly when the boys are due to arrive next week however – that depends on the Kuwaiti prime minister and the availability of the private jet, which he has insisted should bring them.
It now seems clear that Ali will not return to Baghdad for long once his treatment is complete. Among those keen to help is a Canadian-Iraqi doctor who has offered to adopt Ali and arranged for Canadian citizenship for the boy and his extended family. Wilson, who remains one of the few people that Mohammed Abd Hamzah trusts, believes the family will almost certainly go to Canada once this stage of Ali’s therapy is complete. ”It’s a pretty good offer, even if you have both your arms, if you come from a Baghdad slum.”
Despite declaring himself ”hugely unimpressed” with the behaviour of the British journalists, Wilson recognises that were it not for the hot blast of media attention, Ali Ismaeel Abbas would certainly be dead today.
Exactly one week after Samia Nakhoul stumbled across Ali in his hospital bed, another young Iraqi from a village near Basra was flown to Britain by the RAF. Raeed Amar was 14 years old and suffering from 85% burns after a bomb in his village set fire to a stash of cans of cooking fuel that villagers had collected before the war.
Horrifically burned from head to foot, he was left with virtually no skin. ”His mother was devastated,” said a charity worker who befriended the family. ”She would talk to him by his bedside, but he was unconscious the whole time. They come from a poverty-stricken village and live in a hut. She scrapes a living in the fields.”
On May 4, he died. Five days later she took her son’s body home to bury him. – Guardian Unlimited Â