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Asraa in Iraq, 2000

Photo by Alan Pogue

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Asraa in Houston 2004

Photo by Alan Pogue

Asra'a

Alan Pogue took this striking photograph of an injured Iraqi child in March of 2000. He had traveled to Iraq to participate in a Veterans for Peace and Voices in the Wilderness project to rebuild a water treatment plant in Basra. Sanctions had devastated the country, causing the deaths of some 5,000 children each month for 13 years, the majority from water-borne diseases. Approximately 1.5 million Iraqis died as a result of sanctions, which were supervised by the US and Great Britain, whose veto power in the UN Security Council made the lifting of sanctions impossible despite worldwide concern for the massive suffering and death.

In December of 2002, Alan returned to Iraq and found her in the remote southern village of Abu Floos, where she lives with her family. Her name is Asraa' Amir Mizyad. She was severely injured in a missile attack perpetrated by the US military on the morning of January 25, 1999. She had just finished a test at the Al Najed primary school and was walking home from school when the missile struck. A large piece of shrapnel severed her right arm below the shoulder and she suffered chest and abdominal wounds. A metal fragment remains lodged in her skull, a souvenir of the American Empire; doctors could not remove it for fear of killing her. Asraa was nine years old.

[Asraa in the News]

We went to the Middle East in March of 2003 in an attempt to bring Asraa to the United States for medical care and a prosthetic arm. We stayed in Amman and went to the Iraqi embassy each morning in the hope that visas to enter Iraq would be made available. However, the visas did not come through before the invasion began and Asraa was left behind.

On August 9, 2004, Asraa' arrived in Houston, Texas, for prosthetics services at Shriners Hospital. Read about the process getting her to the United States in these posts from Kuwait .