Nose jobs, tummy tucks: Iraqis join the cosmetic surgery craze

BAGHDAD — 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 U.S.-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 per cent on women. During the height of the fighting, reconstructive surgery for the wounded made up the bulk of his practice, but now most of it is cosmetics unrelated to the war, he said.