BAGHDAD, 24 April 2003 — For five days Samya Ilihadi has prayed over her son like a mechanical Madonna at Baghdad’s main children’s hospital, waving a cloth over his sunken eyes and swollen belly to try to keep him cool. Her five-month-old boy Hassan is just one of thousands of Iraqi children caught in a deadly outbreak of diarrhea and other infections which have erupted in the aftermath of the war.
They are being caused, especially in the capital Baghdad, by a vicious combination of water contamination, electricity blackouts which are rotting food, tons of garbage which have piled up in the streets and open sewage.
Many Iraqi children are also extremely vulnerable because they were malnourished even before the US-led war that brought down Saddam Hussein. Hospitals looted by Iraqi mobs are also short of medicines and supplies. With the weather getting hotter, infections are spreading like wildfire.
“We’ve had a bad outbreak of gastroenteritis cases among children which can make them lose all the water in their bodies and face death,” Dr. Ahmed Abdul Fattah said in a crowded ward at Al-Iskan hospital in the west of the capital. “About 70 percent of all the children who come through the doors of my hospital are suffering from this,” he said, gesturing to beds filled with small bodies next to glassy-eyed mothers in black abaya robes keeping vigils.
“In the month before the war, we were already having about 75 deaths of children suffering from diarrhea and chest infections. We’re expecting more this month,” he said. “Many people have been afraid because of the fighting to see a doctor even if they have diseases in their houses.”
Fattah said his hospital was just getting back to a “good condition” after it was overwhelmed by the war wounded, including from a US missile which exploded in a nearby neighborhood, and being looted.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said most hospitals in the capital are returning to work at a diminished level, but other relief groups have characterized the situation as “critical” because of the lack of supplies. Doctors here and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are worried the outbreak of infections will get worse before it gets better.
“Unfortunately, we can expect many more young children to die rapidly,” said UNICEF’s chief officer in Baghdad, George Hatim. “Even before the war, Iraqi children suffered from malnutrition so it is quite serious. Now the water is contaminated and there is a lot of pollution and the state of the hospitals is really very poor,” he said.
“We can also expect malnutrition to rise to alarming heights from widespread poverty, which is even worse because economic activity is at a standstill.” A team of Canadian health experts who visited the country reported in January that 500,000 of Iraq’s 13 million children were malnourished.
UNICEF also found in 1999 that child mortality had more than doubled since the Gulf War eight years earlier amid economic sanctions slapped on Saddam’s pariah regime. “Humanitarian groups can do a great deal but they cannot be a substitute for a whole system,” Hatim said, pointing out the United States has yet to install a new government in Iraq.
“We’re talking about a whole population, we’re not talking about a refugee camp or an internally displaced population. Iraq is now in a sense a stateless state and it is children who are now suffering and paying the price.”
Besides, proud and independent, Iraqis are finding living under US military occupation hard to take. Nearly all in Baghdad seem grateful to the Americans for ridding them of their reviled former leader, but the long-term presence of US tanks and troops in their country is a price they do not wish to pay. “We would like to thank the Americans because now there is no Saddam Hussein,” said 29-year-old Mohammed Naim, selling shoes from a stall in a rundown northern district of Baghdad. “But now they should leave. Iraq should be run by Iraqis.”
The US military is keeping a low profile in the capital after two weeks of occupation, patrolling the streets in small groups of three or four, usually on foot or in open-sided Humvee military vehicles.
Most of their tanks and big armored vehicles have been redeployed inside the US base at Saddam’s city-center palace, but Baghdadis say the city is still not their own. “We can’t go where we want, move freely where we want,” said Omar Faisal, a medical student. “I have been searched and questioned as if I were the foreigner here. They are not educated people, they are stupid people. They are treating us badly.”
Resentment of the US presence triggered a large demonstration in Baghdad after last week’s Friday prayers. Every day outside the Palestine Hotel, home to most foreign journalists and guarded by US soldiers, there is some kind of anti-US protest.
