The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles
One Woman's Fight to Save Two Orphans of War
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The inspiring true story of a prizewinning foreign correspondent longing for a child, two small Iraqi children in need of a mother, and what love and grief can teach us about family and hope.
Zahra, age three, and Hawra, only a few months old, were the only survivors of a missile strike in Baghdad in 2003 that killed their parents and five siblings. Across the world, in London, foreign correspondent Hala Jaber was preparing to head to Iraq to cover the emerging war. After ten years spent trying to conceive and struggling with fertility problems, Jaber and her husband had finally resigned themselves to a childless future. Now she intended to bury her grief in her work, with some unusually dangerous reporting. Once in Iraq, though, Jaber found herself drawn again and again to stories of mothers and children, a path that led her to an Iraqi children's hospital—and to Zahra and Hawra and their heart-wrenching story. Almost instantly Jaber became entwined in the lives of these two Iraqi children, and in a struggle to advocate on their behalf that reveals far more about the human cost of war than any news bulletin ever could.
Beautifully written and deeply moving, The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles presents a genuinely fresh insight and perspective from a woman who, as an Arab living and working in the West, is able to uniquely straddle both worlds. In its attention to the emotional experiences of women and children whose lives are irrevocably changed by war, Jaber's story offers hope for redemption for those caught in its cross fires.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stirring, frank account, Jaber, a Lebanese-British foreign correspondent depicts her professional work covering the Gulf War and her personal engagement with an Iraqi family caught tragically in the crossfire. Reporting for London's Sunday Times on the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jaber, accompanied by her British photographer husband, Steve Bent, took up the cause of numerous hospitalized children grievously wounded in the bombing and helped start a fund to provide them with better medical attention and supplies. In particular, Jaber learned the extraordinary story of two orphans, the only survivors in a family of seven children who had been engulfed in the firestorm with their parents while fleeing their Baghdad neighborhood in April 2003. Three-year-old Zahra was burned over most of her body and in dire need of sophisticated emergency attention, while her baby sister, Hawra, tossed from a car window, survived unscathed. Jaber, with the help of young American journalist Marla Ruzicka (who eventually died in a car bombing), was able to get Zahra airlifted out, though she later died in an American military hospital. Jaber felt keenly for these orphans, as she had endured years of personal turmoil attempting to get pregnant in her marriage, and she proposed to the girls' grandmother that she adopt them. Jaber demonstrates in this affecting work how she employed her professional passion to aid Iraq's war victims.
