War victims in Iraq turn to social media for help
BAGHDAD: It was spring 2007 in northern Iraq when six-yearold 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 to AP.
Saleem lost her eyesight, right arm and an ear in the explosion, set off by a roadside bomb. Her injuries forced her to drop out of school.
Feeling helpless, Saleem turned to social media to find help. Her appeal grabbed 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 have overwhelmed social media platforms.
The violence unleashed by the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein and the 2014-2017 battle against the Islamic State has wounded hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Poor medical services, scarcity of specialised staff and medical centres, and poverty have exacerbated the suffering. Appeals are posted on the personal Facebook pages of patients or on the pages of aid organisations and public figures with tens of thousands of followers.
Saleem’s mother, Khawla Hussein, remembers the story of her daughter losing her eyesight. 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 surgery for her at a private clinic, but they couldn’t afford the doctor’s $7,500 fee.
Then, last year, her mother made an appeal in a public group on Viber. Days later, a Baghdad-based plastic surgeon, Dr Abbas al-sahan, offered to do free surgeries. Saleem has undergone four surgeries — first, so her face could accommodate the two glass eyes, 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.