Shams Kareem - the "Blind Angel" of Iraq

Doctors give blind Iraqi girl new eyes

(Hala Jaber, Times Online) After flying 2,500 miles from Baghdad and pacing hospitals in London while his daughter underwent four operations in seven weeks, Hisham Kareem knew the moment he had been waiting for had finally arrived. Kareem, 32, bent over three-year-old Shams in Moorfields eye hospital last Wednesday and gazed at her intently. Then he smiled proudly like a father seeing his newborn child for the first time. "Oh God, oh God, my blind angel has eyes now," he said.

‘Blind angel’ has 80 bits of shrapnel inside her

(Hala Jaber, Times Online) The little girl known as the "blind angel" of Iraq and brought to Britain for medical treatment funded by Sunday Times readers has up to 80 pieces of shrapnel in her face and head, doctors discovered last week. One said he was astonished three-year-old Shams Kareem was alive, given the injuries she suffered in a bomb attack in Baghdad in 2006.

Blind Iraqi girl Shams Kareem finds new hope in London

(Hala Jaber, Times Online) Occasionally, something good comes from the carnage and misery of war. Yesterday, at Heathrow airport, a kind of miracle occurred when a three-year-old girl, blind, burnt and disfigured by a terrorist bomb, arrived on a flight from the Middle East for specialist medical treatment in London that her family never believed she would receive.