A Wounded Iraqi Girl's Struggle to Walk Again – and the Strangers Who Came to Her Rescue

This is an Associated Press article written about Ma'rwa Ahteemi, a young Iraqi girl who has been featured extensively on this site. To read more about Ma'rwa's story and find out how you can help, click here.

By Sharon Cohen, ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON – Her pink canvas shoes, her stuffed bears and her sturdy metal leg braces were packed neatly into cardboard boxes, ready for Ma'rwa's long journey home to Iraq. The time for goodbyes was near.

Ma'rwa's friends loaded up jeans, cameras, quilts and rolls of fabric, 475 pounds in all. They packed her medicines, too, not thinking about the day when the supply would run out and they would not be there to find more.

And they carefully wrapped a special gift: a globe that sat next to her hospital bed. Ma'rwa refused to leave it behind. She wanted to take it back to her farm in Iraq.
Ma'rwa could use it one day to show her family how far she had traveled, the ocean she had crossed, the distant places – Texas and Minnesota – where her new friends live.

The outside world, with its cruelties and kindnesses, had never really intruded on her until an artillery shell exploded outside her family's back door.
That blast ripped apart her life and started Ma'rwa Ahteemi on an extraordinary odyssey. With soldiers and strangers rallying around her, the 13-year-old – a girl who loves red nail polish and pink clothes – became more than just one of the thousands of civilian casualties in this war.

Ma'rwa made friends who spanned the continents, from the desert battlefield to the marble halls of Congress, with each one tenderly passing her along.
They helped heal her shattered body, they cheered as she tried to take her first steps, they gave her something she desperately needed – hope.

In the end, they sent her home – a scarred girl back to her scarred land – nurturing their own hopes that what they had done will matter, that it will give Ma'rwa a new start in life.

It was a rainy, windy morning in November, a bloody month for Americans in Iraq, when a mortar shell screamed from the sky deep in the heart of the deadly Sunni Triangle.

Iraqi insurgents lurking in an orchard had launched an attack on a U.S. Army base, but they missed. When the Americans returned fire, they missed, too.

Their 155 mm howitzer shell tore into the earth about 60 yards from a crowded house nestled in the farm fields outside Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

It was 7 a.m., and Ma'rwa Ahteemi and her large family, including 17 brothers and sisters and three mothers, awoke in terror. Debris and red-hot shrapnel pounded their walls and shattered their windows. Babies screamed. Children cried. Everyone wanted to run. Ma'rwa's father said no.

"If we are going to die," he declared, "let us die in our own house." But their panic only grew. "Let's go!" one of Ma'rwa's sisters suddenly shouted, and several others bolted with her into the wet air. Ma'rwa hesitated for a moment, then dashed outside.
Just then, another shell came howling out of the clouds.

In an instant, Ma'rwa's 10-year-old sister was dead, her skull split open. Her 8-year-old brother, 2-year-old sister, baby niece and a stepmother were killed, too.
Ma'rwa was knocked off her feet. Shrapnel pierced her stomach, spine and face. Blood flowed from her nose, ears and mouth. She collapsed in a pool of rainwater, where a live wire had fallen. She struggled to pull herself up, but couldn't move her legs. She screamed for her father. "Carry me!" she cried. "Carry me!"

A few days later, Ma'rwa sat in a hospital bed in Balad, all feeling gone from her legs, tears streaming down her cheeks, as a U.S. Army officer tried to console her. It was Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, the blunt-spoken commander of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment who would become the first link in the long chain of people, each with a special reason, who intervened on Ma'rwa's behalf.

The commander was frustrated. Americans had poured money into this hospital, and yet Ma'rwa and other injured family members were bandaged but seemingly ignored.
"Are they going to be looked at?" he asked an Iraqi surgeon, then proposed bringing in American doctors.

Sassaman was trying to make amends. "We'd made a mistake," he later explained, "and we were trying to help the family out." The ironies of war were ever-present, and not just in Americans trying to help a child inadvertently hurt by their weapons. Sassaman, who would later be disciplined for impeding an investigation into an Iraqi civilian's drowning, was hoping others would hear about his goodwill gesture toward Ma'rwa's family. "People talk," he says. "It was a way of building trust in the community. ... It was the right thing to do."

The chain was about to get longer. An Army trauma surgeon soon arrived and arranged for Ma'rwa, two brothers and a sister to be transferred to the 21st Combat Support Hospital. There, among the sand-coated tents on a sprawling U.S. air base, Maj. Mary Adams-Challenger, a physical therapist, met her newest patient.

She noticed Ma'rwa had a large, potentially life-threatening pressure sore on her backside – caused by the malnourished girl's long days on thin mattresses. Ma'rwa needed treatment for that and so much more: She had to learn a new way to dress, bathe and go to the bathroom (she lost bladder control from her injuries). She needed a wheelchair, too, but Iraq was in turmoil. How could she get one?

"I couldn't sleep at night. I was tossing and turning," says Adams-Challenger. She began e-mailing friends, family, other physical therapists. That's when she discovered a pediatrician stationed just down the road. It was Dr. Sharnell Hoffer, who works in Minnesota but was serving as a major with the Iowa National Guard. Hoffer soon stopped by – and met a sad girl who didn't want to talk or eat. She worried because Ma'rwa was just a scrap of a kid at 4-feet-7½-inches and 60 pounds.

And yet, there was something about Ma'rwa that captivated everyone, including these two women. Maybe it was her big heart, the way she gave her siblings the fruit and toys that soldiers had given her. Maybe it was her strong will. Maybe it was the flicker of her radiant smile. One day, as Hoffer pored over a catalogue of charities, deciding which ones to contribute to, it hit her: Surely, one of these groups could help Ma'rwa. She enlisted another soldier to compose an appeal.

"Several of us are trying to secure treatment for the child back in the U.S," the e-mail said. ". ... Any help or any leads would be GREATLY appreciated." When the note popped up on Marcie Roth's computer screen, 6,000 miles away in Rockville, Md., another link was forged. "Who do I call?" Roth asked herself. As director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, Roth is not only well-connected, she's also famously persistent. Sometimes, she says, she'd like to save time by telling people: "Here's the deal. I'm going to prevail. I always do. So can we cut to the chase?"
Within 72 hours, Roth had lined up the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington to take Ma'rwa and a guardian – and pay for all her medical care.

That was easy. Bureaucracy, that was another matter. Roth had no idea so many agencies had to sign off to get one wounded Iraqi girl carried aboard a Department of Defense plane and flown out of her country. (Only a handful of Iraqi children have been brought to America for emergency medical care since the war began.) Roth contacted Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a supporter on disability issues, and later followed up, buttonholing him at a party. Another link. Harkin wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then called Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

In the desert, Ma'rwa's friends talked with her father, who agreed to let her travel to America. "I want the best for my daughter," he said. Then he added: "I want her to come back and work." Adams-Challenger gently explained Ma'rwa was a different girl now. "There's a lot she will be able to do," she said, "but some things she can't do." There would be no more milking cows, no planting tomatoes in the fields where all the kids in this very poor family work as a matter of survival.

Now that Ma'rwa could do less, Adams-Challenger worried the girl might be dumped in an orphanage. The father vowed that would never happen. By this time, Ma'rwa had a wheelchair – donated by a Texas medical supply salesman – and plans for rehabilitation in America. Her spirits lifted, her eyes began to sparkle, her face glowed. She began wheeling around the hospital, making friends right up to the day she was to go.

On February 28, when Ma'rwa and her uncle landed at Andrews Air Force Base, the two majors were waiting. Adams-Challenger and Hoffer, who'd already rotated back home, flew in from Texas and Minnesota. Dressed in desert uniforms, they bounded up to the belly of the plane and embraced Ma'rwa. She squealed their names and rubbed their backs. Mar'wa also met Marcie Roth.

The Iraqi girl, who had picked up some English, had a message of gratitude from her father. "Daddy thank you," she said. As Ma'rwa's ambulance sped off into the winter night, the majors pointed out the U.S. Capitol, the place where the Iraq war had been debated. Her eyes wide, Ma'rwa gazed at the dome bathed in light. She uttered one word: "Beautiful."

In her first night in America, Ma'rwa made fast friends: She painted the fingernails of all her nurses. But soon it was time for hard work: three hours of therapy every day so she could learn to dress, bathe and navigate her wheelchair. At times, Ma'rwa was a typical teen who'd rather watch television than exercise. But she also was eager to learn.

"I thank my God," she said, "I have been given this chance."
By April, she could dismantle her wheelchair – with her own comical flair: She'd sigh in exhaustion and cross her eyes as she tugged at the seat cushion with cherry-red fingernails and squeezed the back until it folded like an accordion.
Mar'wa could be something of a drama queen.

"She has a lot of personality, this child," says Maria Marchetti, one of her therapists.
And a competitive streak, too. One April afternoon, Ma'rwa challenged the other kids – then her therapists – to wheelchair races. She zipped down the green-and-gray hospital hallway, her gloved hands a blur. Always, the results were the same.
"I beat all of them! I beat all of them!" she cried, pumping her arms high, laughing and tossing her head back.

In three months, Ma'rwa learned much more English, including her victory cheer, gained 15 pounds, strength and confidence. By May, she had taken her first steps in thigh-to-ankle braces that she'll use mostly for indoors. "She's very motivated, very practical, a very creative thinker," says Dr. Sally Evans, who supervised her care. "She catches on quickly to things."

But life will never be the same. Ma'rwa has shrapnel embedded in her spinal cord and stomach. She also has nerve damage in her legs. The girl who liked to frolic on her farm, cook, sew, even slaughter chickens – she demonstrates by drawing a line with her finger across her throat with a gleeful grin – must adapt. But Ma'rwa doesn't concede much.

"I can still wash my clothes," she says. "Just sit me on the floor and bring me the pot. I can do anything." Beneath that determination, though, Mar'wa harbors fears and doubts. She confided them to Abir Elsiyed, her Sudanese-born translator, worrying she won't be able to dance like other women at village weddings, agonizing over the shelling.

"Why us?" Ma'rwa asked Elsiyed one day, holding up three fingers to indicate how many steps away her uninjured neighbors were that morning. "We can't say why," the translator replied. "It was meant to be. You have to be accepting and patient. ... This is not by your hand. It's the destiny of God."

Elsiyed, a serene presence with her beatific smile and whispery voice, tried to fill Ma'rwa with happy thoughts. "I'm going to visit you one day ... and you will be a grown woman and even more beautiful than you are now," she said, then added a gentle joke. "I will see you with your kids and you will be shouting at them."
Ma'rwa enjoyed those stories. She had plenty of her own to share with her family in Iraq.

"I will tell them everything," she says. "I will never forget anything about being here."

As spring edged toward summer, Ma'rwa was eager to return home. To what, it's difficult to say. Despite all her progress, life in Iraq will not be easy. Wheelchairs aren't suited for the unpaved roads around her farm. Even her newly learned independence – dressing and bathing herself – only goes so far. "She can do all these things, but so what? Will it serve her properly in her world?" says Evans, her supervising doctor.

Yes, says Dr. Eaman Algobory, a national medical officer in Baghdad for the International Office for Migration. She is convinced Ma'rwa's rehabilitation was invaluable. "She has been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," the doctor says, noting that the state-of-the-art therapy she received puts her far ahead of many other war-disabled Iraqis.

Ma'rwa will need money and medicine to stay healthy. While there is no long-term plan for her future, her chain of friends remain committed to her. The National Rehabilitation Hospital donated a year's supply of medicines and supplies (worth $8,000) and ordered a special wheelchair with thick wheels, suitable for sand. Marcie Roth raised more than $10,000 for Ma'rwa's family and established a fund to collect more.

Algobory, the Iraqi doctor, is confident Ma'rwa will marry, that her time here made a difference. "Mar'wa is a very strong girl," she says, "and she has been given hope." Ma'rwa cried on her last day in America. She gave Abir Elsiyed, her confidante, a silver bracelet and said: "Just think about me whenever you look at it." It was late May when Ma'rwa was carried aboard a C-141 military transport for her journey home. Elsiyed was there to share a final embrace.

"I don't want you to forget me," Ma'rwa said, "and I want you to forgive me for the times I was silly and naughty." Elsiyed clutched Ma'rwa's hand and replied: "I love you and I will for the rest of my life." She now keeps a photo of Ma'rwa on her dresser. Marcie Roth has several pictures, too.

Two days after departing, Ma'rwa and her uncle, Saleh Mohammed Ali, landed at the U.S. military air base in Balad. She arrived singing songs and playing her CD player. She immediately asked for her wheelchair. Her father loaded two trucks with her possessions as they headed to their house, now repaired with part of the compensation the U.S. military provided for the family's losses. As they set out, the base was shaken again. A mortar fired by Iraqi insurgents landed nearby. No one was hurt.

Ma'rwa Ahteemi returned home safely.


EDITOR'S NOTE – Among those interviewed for the story were Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, who provided an account of the accidental shelling; Ma'rwa Ahteemi; her uncle, Saleh Mohammed Ali; Majs. Mary-Adams Challenger and Dr. Sharnell Hoffer; Marcie Roth of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association; and Dr. Sally Evans, Maria Marchetti and Abir Elsiyed of the National Rehabilitation Hospital. A special Ma'rwa's Fund has been established at the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, PO Box 631002, Baltimore, Md. 21263-1002.