How Ali Beat The Odds

Four years ago, the face of a young boy was splashed across the front pages of newspapers and television screens around the world. There was something angelic about the face of a 12-year-old Iraqi boy with bad burns and no arms.

His name was Ali Abbas, and he was quickly becoming the icon of the war in Iraq. Just 12 days after the war began, Ali Abbas lost his parents, his brother, 13 other members of his family, and his arms, when a stray American bomb demolished his house outside Baghdad. His body was covered in third degree burns and no one thought he would survive. But he did.

As correspondent Bob Simon reports, he is not an icon any more. He is a teenager. And we thought we would track him down; find out where he is, and how he is doing.

He was one of hundreds of cyclists gathered for the start of a 60 mile ride to Oxford. Ali Abbas was a member of a team called the Baghdad Bikers.

He steers his special bike by moving his shoulders. For Ali, his new bike was going to give him something he had missed.

"It make me feel that I could do everything, you know. It make me think I'm normal, you know," Ali explains.

The Baghdad Bikers were off to Oxford, 60 miles. Ali had never done more than 10 miles on a bike. But that wasn't going to stop him. Not after everything he had been through. Four years ago, the thought of a bike ride or even of England would have been preposterous.

Even when he was lying in a Baghdad hospital bed, there was something about him. "His face was like an old Italian renaissance painting. He had a biblical countenance. It was the absolute face of innocence," says Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker magazine, who was the first westerner to see Ali, and the first reporter to bring him into the public eye.

Anderson stumbled across Ali in a decrepit Baghdad hospital the day after the bombing. It was the spring of 2003. Anderson asked to see the hospital's worst case. Doctors took him to Ali.

"And it seemed absolutely impossible that two arms could just be roasted and the rest of the body remain intact," Anderson recalls.

On his hospital bed, Ali bit his lip, tried to hide the pain of amputated arms and burns that blackened so much of his body. He didn't always succeed. Even his doctors couldn't bear to watch. But no one thought his pain would last very long.

When Anderson left the hospital that day, he did not expect to see Ali again – he expected the boy to die.

But then, his picture was published around the world and the calls started coming in. In Britain, Diana Morgan had just started her job at London's Limbless Association.

"We got many, many phone calls from Americans. Pilots of private planes wanted to fly into Baghdad. People phoning up. Women sobbing, sobbing, 'If he gets out, I want to adopt him,'" Morgan remembers.

Money started pouring into the Limbless Association. A half million dollars in just 10 days. A fund was set up in Ali's name, as a memoriam.

"We started getting word back through the head doctor who said, 'He won't survive. The injuries are too appalling,'" Morgan recalls.

But then U.S. Marines came on a mission of salvation, taking Ali on a dangerous trip to Kuwait and a sparkling new hospital.

Doctors there operated on Ali's burns, several times.

After three months, Ali was ok to move, but where to? He wouldn't get the care he needed in Iraq. Offers came in from everywhere. The Limbless Association promised him new arms and a new life. That was four years ago.

Ali is now 16 and lives outside London, where he attends an exclusive private school in upscale Wimbledon. And he's able to hold his own with his well-scrubbed classmates.

His English friends, like Pele Ling, can't believe Ali is in Wimbledon. "Occasionally, I just step back and think, 'Wow, this boy he's been through so much. He's in the papers and then a few months later he's there. And when you think about it like that, you realize how amazing it is,'" Ling explains.

Ali lives in an apartment with his uncle and a fellow Iraqi amputee named Ahmed. Ali so desperately wants to fit in at school that he has cosmetic arms put on in the morning so that he won't stand out. It's the only time he wears them. He was given special robotic arms when he first came to London but found them too heavy and cumbersome, so he gave them up.

For now, he doesn't want to be bothered because he's too busy being a teenager. Asked what he likes most about living in England, Ali says, "Girls."

The boy with no arms or parents, the boy who suffered the most horrific trauma imaginable, is not exactly what you might expect. "I think the first thing he said to me was either an insult or a joke," remembers Tim Hobbs, Ali's headmaster at Hall School Wimbledon."

And he won't soon forget the day he opened his doors to Ali back in 2003. "I was sitting and Ali leaned over to me and said, 'You are a fat old man.' And I said, 'That wasn't a very nice thing to say.' But I'd expect he'd been doing adjectives with his teacher and decided that he had a couple that suited me."

What Ali adores, aside from English girls, is the English language. His command of English is remarkable considering that his vocabulary consisted of only two words when he landed in London.

"Your friends and your headmaster say that you are becoming more English by the day. Do you feel that you are becoming more English?" Simon asks Ali

"No, I like learning, I like speaking English but I still want to be Iraqi," he says, smiling.

This Iraqi kid not only speaks English, with the help of a private tutor, he writes English, with his feet. And he's learned to illustrate with his feet. The combination has enabled Ali to become a storyteller. His drawings and writing have spawned a children's book called "Emilio the Lion." It's about a lion who is a vegetarian.

Emilio, the product of Ali's imagination, is shunned by his pride of lions because he won't eat meat but he is adopted by a herd of buffalo who christen him, in Ali's words, a Lionuffalo.

Ali's art has been featured in a London gallery. The rest of the world may see him as a victim, as a symbol of the war. Ali wants none of it, didn't even want to talk to us about it.

Asked if he feels sorry for himself, Tim Hobbs says, "Never, absolutely not. I think he's surrounded by many children that frequently feel sorry for themselves. And he, you know is missing some limbs and it puts it into proportion for the other children big time."

Ali's headmaster, his tutor and his friends are all amazed at how well adjusted – even happy – Ali seems to be. But they worry about the future. He won't have to leave England, but when Ali turns 18, he will be too old to attend this private school. And, he will have to become more independent. Right now, whenever he needs help, there is someone there.

"Do you think he's getting used to being taken care of?" Simon asks the headmaster.

"Yes. And, and our difficulty is persuading him to achieve greater independence is frustrated by the fact that we don't really have parents that can give us support to discipline him and encourage him," Hobbs replies.

Hobbs and everyone 60 Minutes spoke to insist Ali has shown no signs of trauma, almost.

From school, he phones his surviving half sisters in Iraq once a week, and learns in well-heeled Wimbledon that very little has changed in war torn Iraq.

"On one occasion he had a, a fantastic day at school. He was very joyful, very excited. And then asked to phone his family back in Iraq at the end of the day. And the next thing I saw, he was extremely sober, had obviously been crying. And he'd heard that one of his uncles had been killed in a car bomb. And he just said to me, 'Mr. Hobbs, please don't ever go to Iraq,'" Hobbs recalls.

But Ali goes, every summer. He hops on a plane and steps back into the past. Ali's visits remind his family, what's left of it, of what they've all lost.

And Ali wants to see what he lost: the spot where his old house stood. Memories of the way things used to be, before his life as he knew it was blown to bits.

"What do you remember about the night that the bombs fell on your house?" Simon asks.

"Just, I remember that when I waked up I found myself in the hospital. And, when that guy helped me to get out, you know, of the fire, just heard my family shouting. And crying, yeah," he says.

That guy was a neighbor, who rescued Ali and took him to a hospital in central Baghdad. In all,16 members of his extended family died. His amputated arms were buried together with his father.

"Are you bitter or angry about what happened to you?" Simon asks.

"Yeah, I am angry because I lost my parents and my arms as well. But, you can't do anything about it," Ali says.

"What do you think now when you see pictures of yourself as a 12-year-old boy lying in a hospital very badly burned?" Simon asks.

"I feel very brave. Proud of myself," Ali says.

And to think that Ali didn't just survive; he lives in a peaceful place and has prospects for a bright future. That's a lot more than can be said for most Iraqi casualties of the war.

"As the prime discoverer of Ali, you must wonder from time to time how many more Alis are out there," Simon asks Jon Lee Anderson.

"Oh there's thousands. Thousands," Anderson says.

What was it that got Ali through it all? Was it just luck, a photograph? Or was it also something we saw on that 60-mile bike ride from London to Oxford? We were convinced Ali would pack it in at the halfway point. He didn't. We then thought the steep hills would force him to quit, and they almost did. But then the Ali who was on that hospital bed in Baghdad punched through, the boy who bit his lip and marched on. At mile 60, he made it to the streets of Oxford. Nine hours after he'd left London, he reached the finish line.

Ali Abbas never asked to be a hero in an inspirational tale. It just worked out that way.
Produced By Draggan Mihailovich