Member-only story
‘Where Will All This Pain Go?’
It’s time to grapple with the real human costs of the Iraq invasion
It’s been 16 years since the start of the Iraq War; 16 years since a U.S. missile slammed into the home of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas on the outskirts of Baghdad, as Americans fought their way into the city. The explosion jolted Ali awake in time to see the ceiling collapse on him. Then the rubble caught fire. He heard people screaming as they burned to death. More than a dozen members of his family, including his parents and brother, perished that night.
Ali was rushed to a hospital, where he was treated for severe burns on half his body. As doctors prepared to amputate both of his arms, an American appeared at his bedside. It was the journalist Jon Lee Anderson, whose article about the incident would be published in the New Yorker the following week. “One of his hands was a twisted, melted claw,” Anderson observed. “It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.”
Anderson’s story sparked a media frenzy, and Ali soon found himself holding court for a hodgepodge of foreign reporters. “If I had hands, I would shake your hand,” Ali told one of them. “They cut them off after the bomb. I want my hands.”
Thousands of civilians were killed or wounded in the initial invasion of March and April 2003. But in Ali, the media found a story that succinctly captured the depth of the suffering. He was Iraq’s Napalm Girl. “The despairing face of Ali has become a symbol around the world of the casualties of the Iraq war,” declared the Times of London.
Even as Ali had become an emblem of the war, the hospital staff in Baghdad was trying desperately to get him evacuated to Kuwait for life-saving surgery. He still hadn’t been given any pain medication — supplies were that low. Ali’s journalist friends tried to help, but with each passing day, he felt more and more betrayed. “We need realities, not dreams,” Ali’s doctor fumed to the Daily Telegraph. Then Ali stopped taking questions.
The U.S. military finally intervened and airlifted Ali to Kuwait, where he was whisked through a crush of photographers waiting for him on the tarmac and delivered straight to an emergency room. He shrieked in pain as doctors got to work scrubbing his…
