The first sight of Abdullah Suleiman isn’t for the faint-hearted: when he was six years old the bottom half of his face was blown away by a car bomb. The excruciating cost of war in Iraq is written in the crisscross lines of stitches holding his rebuilt nose and mouth in place.

When Abdullah, nicknamed Abi, was referred to a surgical unit run by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières in December 2006, eight weeks after the explosion in Baghdad, there was a gaping hole where his nose, mouth and chin should have been. He had lost his left eye and his skull was visible where the tissue had been torn away.

Over the past three years, step by tiny step, surgeons have been painstakingly attempting to get him to the point where he can speak and eat. First, they took a muscle from his back and, in a 16-hour operation, fashioned cheeks, a nose and a new eye socket, then fitted a prosthetic eye. Now, they have brought down the tip of his nose and re-sculpted his cheekbone. “Nothing is easy,” says his father, Daoud, “but slowly we are making progress.”

The bomb was detonated as a crowd gathered for the funeral of Abi’s grand-father, who had died the previous day. It killed six people, injured scores of others and shattered the Suleimans’ lives. Abi’s mother, Adwa’a, has a photograph of her “beautiful boy” before the explosion, and every time she sees it, she cries.

While Daoud, with his kind, dark eyes, has sat for months by his son’s bedside in this hospital ward in Amman, Jordan, Adwa’a has had to cope alone with her other two children 500 miles away in Baghdad, where fear is still part of everyday life.

This morning, with the sun streaming through the window, Abi is sitting up on his narrow bed hugging his knees to his chest. Plastic toes peep out beneath the left leg of his pyjamas: as a result of the blast the leg was amputated below the knee. His expressionless face is inscrutable — the stitches mean he can neither smile nor talk — but his one “good” eye stares up with amused intensity. It’s surprising how quickly the mind adjusts after the initial shock of his appearance. It’s easy to see just how beautiful he once was.

What he feels about the damage and pain inflicted on him is anyone’s guess. “I have tried once or twice to talk to him about what happened,” says his father, “but he doesn’t remember anything and he doesn’t ask.”

Abi is not always so quiet. Later in the day I catch him running up the corridor, pushing his friend Ali in a wheelchair. Ali, 12, lost his right arm and leg and his left foot was seriously damaged by an explosion in a marketplace when he was seven. Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of orange as a small figure darts across the corridor from one room to another. It’s Samira, a nine-year-old girl who loves pretty things, in an orange tracksuit and sparkly hairband with a huge, fake ruby on the top. The Barbie bangles on one wrist just stay on over the stump where her hand should be. Samira was badly burnt when she was just three months old.

Mohammed, 15, is painfully self-conscious and tries to hide his swollen, misshapen skull under a peaked cap. He was walking to school on the outskirts of Baghdad in 2005 when a car bomb exploded. “My friends and I used to pass by each other’s houses. This day, as we were walking along, there was a bomb. Four of my friends were killed, another lost a leg and I was burnt,” he says.

Mohammed has been in Amman for two months. “I’m very grateful, but I miss my brothers and sisters,” he says. “I want to go home.”

There are believed to be more than 8,000 children who have been severely injured in the conflict in Iraq, and the bombing continues: last month around 150 people were killed on one day by two car bombs in Baghdad. These children, though it sounds trite, really are the lucky ones, given some hope of a relatively normal life by a unique programme in which a team of orthopaedic, maxillofacial and plastic surgeons — mostly exiled Iraqis — are working together to ameliorate the damage caused by six years of war.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) was founded in 1971 by a group of French doctors and is renowned for its work in the world’s conflict zones. It ran a surgical unit in Baghdad until 2004, when the sectarian violence that followed the US-led invasion in 2003, which deposed Saddam Hussein, descended into chaos. In 2005 alone, there were 478 suicide bombings, mostly in the capital. Foreigners were under constant threat of kidnapping or murder. In common with every other NGO, MSF reluctantly pulled its people out. The Iraqi medical system was disintegrating. In the days following the invasion, many hospitals were looted of everything, even the beds. With violence all around them, some doctors took to carrying guns alongside their stethoscopes. Electricity and water shortages made even basic hygiene impossible. A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that of 34,000 doctors who were registered in Iraq in 1990, about 20,000 have left the country.

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