ASHEVILLE – In September, Anne Craig went from despair to hope when she met Salee Allawe, a 9-year-old Iraqi girl who lost both legs in a U.S. bomb attack near her home.

“I knew I could do something about the devastation that’s been caused in Iraq,” Craig said. “I decided then to start a chapter of No More Victims here in Asheville.”

No More Victims is a national relief organization that works to get medical sponsorship for war-injured Iraqi children and to forge ties between the children, their families and communities in the United States. It is the subject of the monthly movie night at the Unitarian/Universalist Church on Friday.

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GreenvilleOnline.com has a short clip of Salee’s departure.

One works in literacy training, another to prevent child abuse. A third cares for her ailing grandparents.

With day jobs like those, you’d think they’d spend their free time unwinding at the spa. Instead, these women put their heads together to help a war-injured child in Iraq.

The result is new prosthetic legs for Salee Allawe, a 10-year-old Iraqi girl who lost both limbs below the knee in an air strike last fall. (more…)

There’s an elevator at Falls Park but Salee Allawe is determined to take the stairs from Main Street down to the bridge over the Reedy River.

“I want to do it,” the plucky 10-year-old Iraqi girl announces.

And so she does, carefully placing her right prosthetic leg on a step and then her left, using bubble gum pink forearm crutches for support. (more…)

People Magazine spent some time with Salee, NMV and local volunteers in Greenville, SC. They got some great photographs and put together a 4-page spread for their September 14 issue. Here are scans of their pages (the images are rather large):

Opening Spread
Page 3
Page 4

Eight months after an American bomb blew off her legs, 9-year-old Salee Allawy came to Greenville, S.C., for surgery, therapy and prosthetic legs.

She came with her father, Hussein Allawy, sponsored by the nonprofit, No More Victims, which works to obtain medical scholarships for war-injured Iraqi children, and to forge ties between American and Iraqi communities.

“I wasn’t expecting the kindness,” Allawy said through an interpreter. “In Iraq, we see the bad side of America. Here we see the good side.” (more…)

Salee Allawe, a ten-year-old child, was critically injured on November 7, 2006 while playing with her brother, cousin and some friends outside her uncle’s home in Haswa, Iraq. Salee said they were playing hopscotch when US jets flew overhead and fired missiles. A US missile killed her 15 year-old brother and her cousin and blew off Salee’s legs at the knees.

Salee and her immediate family are Sunnis and were forced to leave Baghdad by Shiite militias. Salee’s father, Hussein Allawe, took them to Haswa, a central Iraqi town between Baghdad and Fallujah, to stay with relatives. I met the vibrantly beautiful Salee at the University of South Carolina in Columbia on 9/12/07 at a presentation of her odyssey to America sponsored by the Muslim Student Ass’n, No More Victims, the Upstate Coalition for Compassion and the Carolina Peace Resource Center. (more…)