Baghdad, March 23: Dr Abbas al-Sahan’s patient wasn’t a war victim. She didn’t have a scar that needed cosmetic surgery. All she wanted was a cute nose. And she got it.
Speaking after the surgery, bandages and swelling gone, 23-year-old Sarah Saad Abdul-Hameed was ecstatic. Friends who visited “were surprised with the change in my face,” she said. “They compared my nose to Nicole Kidman’s!”
Even in the worst spasms of violence that followed the 2003 US-led invasion, cosmetic surgery didn’t go out of style. Now, as the country has quieted down, nose jobs, Botox and liposuction are all the rage. Al-Sahan, one of Baghdad’s premier plastic surgeons, said he averages about 20 cosmetic surgeries a week — 70% on women.
Interest in plastic surgery has blossomed since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and the end of economic sanctions that isolated Iraqis from the influences and pop culture of the outside world. Also, doctors who fled the violence are trickling back.
But Iraq being an overwhelmingly Muslim country, some have inevitably sought guidance from the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most revered Shiite religious figure.
The verdict on his website? Hair implants are preferred over a wig, which can fall off during prayer. Liposuction to remove fat, and surgery to make breasts smaller or bigger, are OK as long as female patients go to a woman doctor.
-Agencies