Ali moved to Kuwait for urgent treatment

A KUWAITI hospital was last night preparing to receive an Iraqi boy whose arms were blown off in a coalition air raid.

Medical staff treating 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas have said he may die unless he is immediately flown out for specialist treatment.

Both of Ali’s parents were killed in an attack last week on his home in Baghdad, in which he was also severely burned.

An intensive care room has been set aside for Ali at the Ibn Sina Hospital, north of Kuwait City, with emergency medical crews on standby.

Dr Ahmad Al Shatti, spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Kuwait, said the orphaned youngster was due to be airlifted from Baghdad at some point this evening.

He pledged that doctors would do everything they could to tend to the child’s horrific injuries.

“He will have the best possible treatment. If he arrives in the right time I think he will be stabilised and saved.

“He will be taken to intensive care at the burns unit and assessed thoroughly. The immediate concern will be to clean his burns and nourish him,” he said.

It is feared the youngster, who suffered 60% burns, risks infection due to the severity of his injuries and could die without expert surgery.

He said the boy’s plight had touched the hearts of the Kuwaiti people

“I was in a meeting this morning and everybody was talking about it.”

He said it was difficult at this stage to say what surgery Ali would undergo but added: “We have to see him. I’m very optimistic.”

The decision to take Ali to Kuwait was taken during a governmental cabinet meeting and the first deputy prime minister Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah personally called for him to be treated in his country after the boy’s case was highly publicised, Dr Al Shatti said.

Images of Ali lying in his hospital bed were transmitted around the world. Kuwait is already treating seven Iraqi children injured in the war, the ministry said. All are said to be stable.

Hospitals in Iraq are simply unable to cope, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has warned.

“Hospitals are having to deal with ill children without the drugs they need and without water,” spokeswoman Kathryn Irwin told BBC News Online. “How can you treat someone without clean water?” She also warned unless hospitals got urgent help, more children would became dangerously malnourished, putting more pressure on the hospitals.

“Ali’s voice is one among millions of children’s voices we’re not hearing,” said the spokeswoman.

The offer of help from Kuwait in the case of Ali Ismail Abbas, came

after a nurse at the Saddam City hospital in Baghdad, where he is being treated, issued a direct plea to coalition leaders.

Fatin Sharhah’s letter to US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair read:

“The situation is desperate. He will die if he stays.” Ms Sharhah’s letter said that Ali’s condition was deteriorating every day.

She said unless Ali received special care he could die of blood poisoning.

“Please send one of your helicopters or planes,” she wrote.

“You have all this technology to bomb us, to make the missile that burned Ali’s house, but you cannot spare one aircraft for one day to save a life?”