Journalist describes what happened to Ali's family - the boy who lost both his arms

One of Dr. Saleh’s assistants, a young woman, had pulled some images up on a computer screen in his office. Dr. Saleh invited me to look at them with him. The first image the assistant showed us was of a boy lying naked in the emergency operating theatre. A catheter and tube was attached to his penis. The child’s legs were smooth, but his entire torso was black, and his arms were horribly burned. At about the biceps, the flesh of both arms became charred, black grotesqueries. One of his hands was a twisted, melted claw. His other arm had apparently been burned off at the elbow, and two long bones were sticking out of it. It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.

The child’s face was covered by an anesthesia mask. “This is Ali,” Dr. Saleh said. “He is twelve. He was wounded in a rocket attack the night before last in the southeastern part of Baghdad, about fifteen minutes from here. Ali lost his mother, his father, and his six brothers and sisters. Four homes were destroyed; in one of them, the whole family was killed, eight people.”

It was hard to imagine that the person in the photograph could be alive, but Dr. Saleh said that Ali was still conscious. “I don’t think he will survive, though,” he said in a flat tone. “These burned people have complications after three or four days; in the first week they usually get septicemia.” His assistant was pulling up new images on her monitor. They showed Ali again, on the same bed and in the same position as before, but this time without his charred appendages. Both arms had been amputated, and the stumps were wrapped in white bandages. His torso was covered in some kind of clear grease. The mask had been removed from his face, and he appeared to be sleeping. He had a beautiful head, with the feminine features of a prepubescent boy. In another picture, Ali was awake, staring at the camera with large, expressionless eyes.

Dr. Saleh’s assistant breathed in sharply and put one hand over her mouth. Then she brought up some images of Ali’s family just after the bodies had arrived at the hospital’s morgue. It was difficult to make out what had once been human beings. Cloth stuck to the bodies, bits of bold red-and-green fabric with flower designs. There seemed to be some straw mixed in, and I asked Dr. Saleh if they had been farming people. He said yes, and pointed out Ali’s mother. Her face had been cut in half, as if by a giant cleaver, and her mouth was yawning open. In other pictures, which Dr. Saleh said were of Ali’s father and a younger sister, all I could see was a macabre collection of charred body parts and some red flesh. The body of his brother was all there, it seemed, but from the nose up his head was gone, simply sheared off, like the head of a rubber doll. His mouth, like that of his mother, was open, as if he were screaming.

“Have you seen enough?” the assistant asked me quietly. I didn’t say anything, so she showed me more pictures. After a few minutes of this, Dr. Saleh said,“O.K. This is just part of the tragedy.” He asked me if I wanted to see Ali.

I followed Dr. Saleh to the burn unit, where some men helped us on with green smocks, face masks, gauzy hair nets, and shoe coverings. Then we walked down a bare and quiet hall that reminded me of a prison corridor. The only thing on the walls was a framed portrait of Saddam Hussein. Dr. Saleh opened a door and we went into a small room where an older woman in a black abaya, Ali’s aunt, was sitting in a chair. A tiny window in the far wall of the room let in some sunlight. The aunt was sitting next to a bed on wheels that had a hooplike structure over it. Dr. Saleh carefully pulled back a coarse gray blanket, and I saw Ali’s naked chest, his bandaged stumps, and his face. His large eyes were hazel, flecked with green. He had long eyelashes and wavy brown hair. I didn’t know what to say.

Dr. Saleh asked Ali how he felt. “O.K.,” he said. Wasn’t he in a lot of pain, I said to Dr. Saleh, in a whisper. I spoke in English. “No,” he replied. “Deeply burned patients don’t feel much pain because of the damage to their nerves.” I stared at Ali, who looked back at me and at Dr. Saleh. His aunt got up and stood behind the head of the bed. She said nothing.

I asked Dr. Saleh to ask Ali what he was thinking about. Ali spoke for a moment in Arabic, in a boy’s soft, high-pitched voice. “He doesn’t think of anything, and he doesn’t remember anything,” Dr. Saleh said. He explained that Ali did not know that his family was dead. I asked Ali about school. He was in the sixth grade, he said, and his favorite subject was geography. As he spoke, his aunt stroked his hair. Did he like sports? Yes, he replied, especially volleyball, and also soccer. Was there anything he wanted, or needed? No, nothing. He looked at me and said something that Saleh didn’t translate until I insisted: “He says that Bush is a criminal and he is fighting for oil.” Ali had said this as he had said everything else, without expression. Ali’s aunt began to sob quietly behind him. I asked Ali what he wanted to be when he grew up. “An officer,” he said, and his aunt cried out, “Inshallah”—“If God wills it.”

Dr. Saleh had begun to weep, and I could hear him catching his breath. He tried to compose himself, and we said goodbye to Ali. Neither of us spoke as we walked down the hall to the sterile room, where the orderlies took off our smocks and masks. Dr. Saleh rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat several times. We went back to his office, and he washed his face in a sink. “So it’s untrue what they say about doctors being able to suspend their emotions,” I said.

He looked at me. His eyes were pink. “We are human beings,” he replied. He explained that Ali knew that he had lost his arms, but that he had not acknowledged it yet: “He is conscious. He can see the stumps.” Ali would likely die within three weeks.

Dr. Saleh said that the hospital had taken in about three hundred people who had been injured by the bombing. The doctors had managed to save everyone so far, although twenty people were already dead when they arrived. “War always brings tragedy, fear, pain, and psychological trauma,” he said. “Personally, I feel that problems can be solved by discussion and negotiation and collaboration. When you use military power, it means your brain has stopped. As an Iraqi, I feel that this is my country, and that I should work to maintain it and protect it from invasion, whatever invasion it is. I think any person would take this position when his country is attacked.”

Dr. Saleh has three sons and a daughter. The oldest child is twelve, the same age as Ali. Dr. Saleh works long hours at the hospital, and ever since the city’s telephone exchanges were bombed he hasn’t been able to call home to see how his family is doing. He was worried.