Aisha Mohammadzai, or Bibi Aisha, became a symbol of the militants’ cruelty and repression of women when she was photographed at a women’s shelter two years ago.
She is now undergoing a series of complicated and painful operations to rebuild her nose after being taken to America in late 2010.
Aisha, who says she is 20 or 21, underwent a fourth operation, lasting eight hours, earlier this week at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland.
Surgeons hope the procedure marks the halfway stage in their work and they can complete the reconstruction next year. A limp piece of skin, taken from her forearm, has already taken the place of her nose, but she said she was undeterred by her appearance.
“I don’t care. Everybody has some kind of problem,” she told CNN. “At the beginning, I was very scared. I was scared to look at my face in the mirror … to think what will happen in the future to me. But now I’m not scared anymore.” Doctors will use cartilage from her ribs to rebuilt the structure of her nose and then cover it with skin from her forehead, which has been swollen with painful injections of saline.
Her case came to prominence when Time magazine used a picture of her on its cover, with the suggestion that this was what would happen if the West left Afghanistan. She was married off as a child bride, and fled her husband, a Taliban fighter, after he and his family beat her and treated her as a slave.
She was captured and returned to her village in the southern province of Uruzgan, where her husband and in-laws mutilated her after a local Taliban mullah judged the case and decided to make an example of her.
Doctors have delayed the surgery until now after they judged she was not emotionally fit for the long, painful procedures when she first arrived in America.
At first she threw violent tantrums and would occasionally hurt herself during what doctors called “faux seizures”.
She is beautiful truly!
Nose Job Blog
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