Iraqi Girl Shows Off Her Restored Face

A 12-year-old Iraqi girl who lost part of her nose during a missile attack three years ago showed off her restored face Monday just weeks after undergoing reconstructive surgery.

A shy and soft-spoken Marwa Naim, dressed in a light green burqa, hugged and thanked the doctors who performed the operation and said she looked forward to reuniting with her father and three siblings in Iraq.

"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.

Miller showed a video of Naim's last visit earlier this month in which she took off the bandage from her nose and smiled while looking at her new face through a handheld mirror.

Naim still faces a long recovery. Her face is still swollen from surgery and there's a scar that runs down the middle of her forehead where doctors removed skin for the nose.

Although the scarring may never fully heal, it'll take between six and nine months for the scars to lighten up, doctors said.

Miller described the surgery as "cosmetic" because Naim was never in danger of dying because of her missing nose. She could still breathe and smell normally with a partial nose, but doctors decided to fix it partly because she was taunted in school for her disfigurement.

"She's got a great spirit," Miller said.

While in the United States, Naim stayed with four Arabic-speaking host families in the Los Angeles area. She started learning English and visited tourists attractions including Universal Studios and SeaWorld.

Naim will return to Iraq later this month.

UCLA Medical Center normally performs about a dozen nasal surgeries a year on patients whose noses are damaged by skin cancer or trauma. The operation costs about $12,000.

Plastic surgeon Dr. George Rudkin said he would welcome the chance to help another war victim.

"It'll be an honor to do it again," he said.

Besides Naim, a handful of other war-wounded children have been flown by various humanitarian organizations to the U.S. for treatment of disfiguring injuries.

The nonprofit Palestine Children's Relief Fund, which paid for Naim's stay in California, estimated that since 1991, the organization has sought medical care for about 700 Middle Eastern children who suffer from mostly war-related injuries.

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