Hala Jaber

"Alfombra voladora sobre Bagdad es un libro sobrio y conmovedor. Una lectura indispensable" Yasmina Khadra En abril de 2003, Hala Jaber se encontraba en Bagdad cubriendo la guerra de Irak. En un sucio hospital de la ciudad encontro a una niña de tres años, gravemente quemada despues de que un misil norteamericano hubiera alcanzado el coche en el que huia con sus padres y sus siete hermanos. La niña se llamaba Zahra, que en arabe significa flor. La madre habia conseguido lanzarla por la ventana del vehiculo en llamas junto a su hermana de tres meses. El bebe habia salido milagrosamente indemne, pero no asi Zahra. La vision de la pequeña, que se debatia entre la vida y la muerte en aquel hospital atestado de heridos y sin apenas medios, conmociono a la periodista. Hala Jaber estaba acostumbrada a contemplar el espectaculo desolador de las victimas civiles en las guerras. A lo largo de sus años como corresponsal, habia visto y entrevistado a hombres, mujeres y niños mutilados, desesperados, agonicos Y, sin embargo, la pequeña Zahra consiguio derribar en un instante las barreras que la periodista habia levantado cuidadosamente para poder informar con distancia y objetividad.

An award-winning journalist on a quest to save two orphans of war. Hala Jaber and her husband had spent ten years trying to conceive, only to resign themselves, finally, to a childless future. Instead of being consumed by grief, they threw themselves into their work as journalists, making the decision to go to Baghdad to report on the coming war. Jaber''s search for stories led her to two orphans at a children''s hospital: Zahra and Hawra. She fought passionately to help them- ultimately even trying to adopt them-before discovering that there is more than one way to love and raise a child, and more than one way to be a mother.

Zahra, aged 3, and Hawra, just a few months old were the only survivors of a missile strike in Baghdad in 2003. Their parents and their five siblings all died. Unable to have children herself, Hala Jaber, an award-winning foreign correspondent, was determined to do all she could to help them. Sent to Iraq by the Sunday Times to cover the war, the last thing she expected was to find herself trying to save two little girls who had lost everything. But what happened next tells us far more about that conflict than any news bulletin ever could. Being a Lebanese Muslim, as well as the employee of a London paper, Hala is in the privileged position of being able to straddle two very different worlds and explain one to the other, and her beautifully written and deeply moving account affords a genuinely fresh insight into the Iraq war and its terrible human cost.