In Fallujah, A Young Amputee Dreams Of Returning To The U.S.
Mustafa Ahmed Abed has a few words of English left from his time as a young child in the United States. These days, he doesn't have anyone to practice them with, so he repeats words to himself over and over as he walks home from school in Fallujah. With one leg, the journey on crutches takes him an hour.
Mustafa, now almost 15, was two years old at the start of the battle for Fallujah in November 2004. As the U.S. shelled al-Qaida fighters in a nearby neighborhood, he and his mother were hit by shrapnel.
"I was carrying him, and all of a sudden, Mustafa flew out of my arms," his mother Nidhal Aswad recalls. "My arm was badly injured and my side was injured ... He was on the ground ... All I could see of him were his intestines all over the place."
Aswad crawled to her baby in the deserted street. His left leg had nearly been severed. When relatives got them to a hospital, making their way through
