After flying 2,500 miles from Baghdad and pacing hospitals in London while his daughter underwent four operations in seven weeks, Hisham Kareem knew the moment he had been waiting for had finally arrived.
Kareem, 32, bent over three-year-old Shams in Moorfields eye hospital last Wednesday and gazed at her intently. Then he smiled proudly like a father seeing his newborn child for the first time.
“Oh God, oh God, my blind angel has eyes now,” he said.
Shams Kareem, who was blinded and disfigured by a bomb that killed her mother in November 2006, had just been fitted with prosthetic eyes in the culmination of a first round of treatment funded by people who donated £128,000 to give her a new chance in life.
Mangled flesh had been replaced by big brown eyes that restored some of the beauty shattered by the bomb. It was a big step towards making her look more like other children.
The change in her appearance will transform her prospects in Iraq, where, in common with many states in the Arab world, disability remains stigmatised and can mean no education, career or marriage.
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