By Damiano Beltrami

AMMAN - Allawi Makki, five, and Imad Halas, seven, often spend their time in endless, dramatic video game challenges between Barcelona and AC Milan in a well-lit room full of toys on the sixth floor of the Qasser Jeddah Hotel in Amman.

But what seems like a charmed life for these two young Iraqi boys is merely a brief respite from childhoods marred by unimaginable horrors.

Halas and Makki, whose faces were deformed by the heat of bomb blasts, are among a number of Iraqi children waiting for surgical procedures at the Red Crescent Hospital run by the French medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

Some of the children need maxillofacial operations to repair severe burns, while others require orthopaedic surgery. But for many of them, the hardest challenge is trying to overcome their psychological traumas.

“They have flashbacks and nightmares, bed-wetting at the age of 10,” said Jousef Masalam, 31, a Jordanian clinical psychologist with Doctors Without Borders who has dealt with 75 children like Makki and Halas since the project began in August 2006. “They can show hyperactivity, aggressiveness or simply fear.”

Makki, a fan of the Brazilian football team, loves Tom and Jerry cartoons and aspires to become an art teacher who gives candies to the students who come up with the best paintings.

Halas enjoys playing tag up and down the stairs of the hotel and running after a green ball in the corridor, dreaming of scoring goals like the Iraqi national captain Younis Mahmoud. As for his future plans, he wants to become a dentist so “people’s smiles will be beautiful”.

For children like Makki and Halas, “play therapy” can offer key insight into the emotional and psychological scars left by their traumatic experiences, and allows psychologists like Masalam to find ways of helping them cope with their pasts and readjust to normal life.

Masalam tries to assess the children’s problems by letting them play and observing how they behave. Sometimes he just sets up a white table with stuffed animals, small model cars and puzzles; then he watches what happens.

“Often they isolate themselves or use their toys aggressively,” he said. “A kid always takes two model cars, bangs one against the other and tells me that that’s the way his dad got killed.”

At other times, the therapist puts watercolours and brushes on the white table and gives the children some paper.

“They use red, yellow and black all the time,” he said. “They paint blood, fire and black smoke.”

Sometimes, Masalam asks them to draw their portraits to see whether they accept themselves for how they look.

He recalled one girl’s picture: “She painted a girl with no face and told me that she didn’t want people to be afraid of her.”

When he goes home, Masalam often feels drained and depressed.

“Here, it’s like Alice in Horrorland,” he said. “Every day you get a case that is tougher than the one you saw the day before.”

However, he said, the rewards of his job sometimes far outweigh the challenges.

“Once a kid was going back to Iraq after the operation,” he said, referring to a child whom he had been following with play therapy for more than six months. “Before jumping on the bus he hugged me and told me, ‘you are like my brother’.”