"A Refugee from the Iraq War" by Elizabeth DiNovella, May 21, 2008
"When we walked into Samia Kouzah's dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn't recognize her daughter as human. Rahmad, age twenty months, sat on the couch quietly looking at us. She has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon.
Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahmad said she wouldn't live past one year old. In September, Rahmad will turn two.
Rahmad sat on her mother's lap, enveloped in Samia's blue and beige veil, and began to fuss. "She has a fever," Samia explained. "She's teething."
Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. Her family was part of the mass 1948 migration of Palestinians. Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan's second largest city, forty-minutes away from Amman. It's a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants--Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis....
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