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12-year-old Iraqi girl gets new nose in LA

(AP)
Updated: 2006-06-13 20:16

When 12-year-old Marwa Naim took off the bandage from her nose earlier this month, she smiled in a handheld mirror. Her face, damaged when a missile attack in Iraq caused her to lose part of her nose, was reconstructed.

Photos of Marwa Naim, a 12-year-old Iraqi girl who was injured by a missile blast in her home in northern Baghdad in 2003, are displayed during a news conference Monday, June 12, 2006, at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. During a series of operations over four months early this year, surgeons took a skin flap from the girl's forehead and ear cartilage to build her new nose. [AP]

On Monday, Naim showed off her face to others. Dressed in a light green burqa, she hugged and thanked the doctors who performed the operation and said she looked forward to reuniting with her father and three siblings in Iraq when she returns there later this month.

"They helped me a lot and they treated me well," Naim, speaking through an interpreter, said of the doctors.

Naim lost a chunk of her nose and her right thumb when a coalition missile struck her home in northern Baghdad in April 2003 in an attack that killed her mother, according to several humanitarian groups that arranged for the girl's trip to California.

This year, Naim was flown to UCLA Medical Center, where plastic surgeons agreed to rebuild her nose without pay. Doctors faced a daunting task: Naim was missing the bulbous tip of her nose and there was a lot of scar tissue from the injury.

During four operations, doctors removed a rectangular skin flap from her forehead and rotated it 180 degrees to fashion a new nose. Then they took cartilage from her ear to rebuild the tip and "to give it a shape," said Dr. Timothy Miller, chief of plastic surgery.