Almost 20 years ago, Faraj Hassan was serving his 36th day as an Iraqi soldier when an Iranian shell blast smashed one of his legs, forcing the amputation the left limb.
After rediscovering sports as the way to cope with his disability, Hassan is now fighting back with a different weapon - captaining a tiny Iraqi wheelchair fencing team trying to reach a world fencing competition in Paris.
But while his squad is confident of its prowess on the fencing piste in the three disciplines of foil, epee and sabre, the team needs a miracle to reach the event itself.
They have just days to submit the paperwork, and must come up with around 8,000 dollars for six people to make the trip, since the national Paralympic federation says it does not have the funds.
Even in the past, the most the federation has been able to give, 37-year-old Hassan says, are promises, adding "we need someone who keeps their promises."
He and 40-year-old team-mate Kadhum Sultan and others have already competed internationally, beating teams from France, Italy, Spain and the United States at an Italian competition that lifted them to eighth in the world.
Owing to a lack of funds however, they missed two subsequent matches and slipped to 22nd place. Now they want to make it to Paris on November 24 to start climbing back.
They have all faced bigger challenges.
Just over a month after being drafted into the army in May 1986, the bottom half of Hassan's left leg was crushed by an explosion. Amputation followed 10 days later.
It typically takes two to three years for disabled people to deal mentally with their state before taking on issues like sports competitions, and none of the fencing teams' 16 members - including three women - are casualties of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Hassan began fencing, and then turned to running with a prosthesis, finding success at a competition in Algeria before coming back to a sport in which he must compete from a wheelchair.
Sultan, an infantry sergeant paralysed from the waist down after shrapnel severed his spinal cord, is permanently confined to his wheelchair but has nonetheless also found success and even a reason to live through fencing.
Not only has it "gotten me out of the house, it changed many things inside of me," he said, adding that after five years, he finally broke out of his despair "all because of sports".
He gets by on a small pension equal to about one-quarter the salary of manual labourers, and lives in a housing compound for disabled soldiers. Others repair generators, drive taxis or sell small items in street stalls.
Hassan lives in a small house with his mother, brothers, wife and four children, and runs his own business installing satellite TV receivers, doing everything from the dishes to the final connection.
"I am satisfied with my life" he said, adding that he was not mad at the world for his lot in life, but was only "fighting from my position as an athlete."
That echoed a slogan by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who urged Iraqis to "fight from your position", regardless of their profession.
"You might think I'm handicapped to look at me, but I'm not," he said.
"Intellectuals say 'disabled', in my village (in southern Iraq) they say horrible words that make me sad, they say 'useless'."
Saddam did little for the handicapped because he saw them as weak, but Hassan said that has not really changed since April 2003. "Nothing has improved," even though he personally does not feel diminished.
Rather, he strives to "teach my kids, provide for their needs and try to make a decent life for them."
Competing with a sabre "is not a war for me", even though the athlete readily admitted that after losing his leg, "I found myself in sports."
Sultan "hesitated at first, but then I got into it", taking advantage of an army rehabilitation program to pick up a different kind of weapon.
Iraqi national teams for handicapped athletes comprise more than 120 members, who compete in basketball, fencing, tennis, weightlifting, and target ball, the latter being a sport for the blind that looks a bit like bowling at goaltenders.
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