The family knew that their baby girl would never walk, and that underneath the smile that melted hearts lay a bitter truth: Noor Al-Zahra was destined for hardship. But Noor had been just a baby, cradled in her grandmother's arms, when she came to Atlanta for a life-saving operation more than two years ago. Now, as she grows older, an even harsher reality is revealing itself - as it did on a recent day in a Baghdad park. The little girl struggled to crawl, on her belly. She slithered snakelike in the grass, struggling to reach her father. Blades of grass clung to her denim outfit. She extended an arm to grasp her father's, oblivious to the limp legs she cannot feel and the feet covered by butterfly-appliqued shoes that faced awkwardly in opposite directions. Her grandmother, Soad, who accompanied Noor and her father, Haider, to Atlanta for her surgery, shook her veiled head as she watched the toddler struggle to move. “Noor will never be like other children,” she said through an interpreter. When Noor was born with a severe spinal cord defect, Iraqi doctors told Soad the baby would not survive. But Noor caught the attention of Georgia Army National Guard soldiers patrolling the family's impoverished Abu Ghraib neighborhood just a few weeks before Christmas in 2005. Guided by goodwill, the Gainesville-based infantrymen shuttled the baby to Atlanta for the medical treatment that eluded her in this war-torn nation. She stayed in Atlanta six months with a host family. Then she was returned to Baghdad with the uneasy fact that though her life had been saved, her future remained uncertain. The medical care in Atlanta restored Noor's life but nothing could undo her paralysis from the waist down. Upon their return to Iraq, the family moved from one Baghdad home to another, fearing retribution from insurgents for taking help from Americans. Haider said he was abducted twice and rarely leaves the house these days. Soad said her grocery shop in Abu Ghraib was bombed. She now runs a smaller stall in Baghdad. Even as Iraqis express optimism that a recent drop in violence might hold, Soad cannot. “For normal people in Baghdad, things may be getting better,” she said. “But not for people like us. Not for people who were targeted.” In early 2006, Dr. Roger Hudgins, chief of neurosurgery at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, removed a tumor on Noor's back and inserted a shunt in her brain to relieve pressure from excess fluids. He recently examined new scans of Noor's brain sent by email from Baghdad. “It looks pretty good,” he said. “This is about what I would expect her brain to look like.” The fluid base in Noor's brain is still bigger than normal, as is the case with most children born with spina bifida. But the shunt is working, he said. “Her brain doesn't look like it is under pressure.” __
