An amputee focuses on the ball.
BAQUBA, Iraq — The Iraqi teenager does not look like a traditional athlete: Her right leg is amputated at the thigh, her left at the knee, and her right arm ends at the biceps.
But when Najla Imad Lafta, 14, plays table tennis, her torso turns as smoothly as a dancer’s to meet the ball. She just brought home her fourth silver and her fourth bronze medal from an international sporting tournament for the disabled in Egypt in June.
“In fourth grade, I realized I was different from the other girls,” said Najla as she sat in her family’s home in Baquba, a provincial capital in Iraq. “I saw my friends were running at school, walking and playing, and they were thinking about what they would do in the future.”
Najla was 3 when a bomb attached to her father’s car went off. The attack was most likely the work of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which targeted her father because he worked at the local military base with American soldiers.
Najla is one of a growing number of Iraqi athletes who are competing in sports at a high level after losing limbs.
Since 2003, there has been an approximately 70 percent increase in the number of Iraqis participating in the Paralympic Games whose injuries are terrorism related, according to Mohammed Abbas al-Salami of the Iraqi Paralympic Committee.
After the bombing, her father rushed her to the hospital. “Once I realized I had lost my legs and arms I cried and cried and became angry because I knew I had lost everything,” she said.
It was this depression that brought Najla to table tennis.
Five years ago, sad that she could not run like her classmates, she bought a table tennis paddle to give herself something to do when she finished her homework.
Mr. Lafta asked a friend who coached table tennis and scouted for Iraq’s Paralympic team to stop by and give her some lessons.
Najla remembers the day Hossam Hussein al-Bayat came to the family’s house. “He said to me, ‘I want you to take that paddle and start training daily,’ ” she recalled.
She began to work on her strokes. Once a week he would take her to his house to practice, coaching her until she was ready to compete against disabled players from other provinces. She was only 12 when
“He said to me, ‘I want you to take that paddle and start training daily.’ ”
NAJLA IMAD LAFTA Iraqi girl disabled in a bombing
she won a place on the country’s Paralympic team.
The key for her success, she said, was not to look at the other players — table tennis is a game where players use psychological tricks against their opponents. “I was talking to myself, saying ‘just focus on the ball, just focus on myself; if I focus on her, I will be afraid,’ ” she said of her opponent.
Najla, one of eight children, practices two or three hours a day at home at a playing table her family bought.
“To be honest, nothing compares to having legs and arms,” Najla said. “But at least I am happy with what I have done.”