BAGHDAD, 16 April 2003 — The little boy wailed and moaned and squirmed on the hospital bed stained with his own blood. A doctor struggled to hold a gauze bandage over the boys’ eyes, which no longer existed.
Ali Mustapha had found a small cylindrical object on the street near his Baghdad home Monday morning. He picked it up. He played with it. He had it in his hands and the object — a live explosive — literally blew up in his face.
At Kadhymia Hospital, Dr. Ausama Saadi’s diagnosis was blunt: “He will be blind for the rest of his life.’’ Ali is 4.
Although combat in Baghdad is virtually over, carnage continues as civilians are cut, gouged and killed when unexploded munitions in city neighborhoods suddenly detonate, often in the hands of people who don’t know what they have innocently picked up. An alarming number of Iraqis being injured and killed are children, who are drawn to the small, grenade-like explosives that can look like toys, said doctors and parents.
“It doesn’t look like a bomb, and they start to play with it,’’ said Dr. Gelal Alta’ai at Kadhymia Hospital.
The suffering and reports of explosives detonating in Baghdad’s neighborhoods have raised concerns among human rights groups that the United States fired scatter-shot rockets and artillery into heavily populated areas where their imprecise trajectories increase the possibility of civilian casualties.
“These are not the kind of weapons you use in cities,’’ said Steve Goose, a weapons researcher for New York City-based Human Rights Watch.
The US Central Command acknowledged Monday in response to questions from Newsday that US forces have hit urban areas of Baghdad with “cluster bombs,’’ which scatter hundreds of small “submunitions’’ in an area the size of a football field.
A CentCom spokeswoman said that the cluster bombs were aimed at Iraqi missile systems and artillery and that “we had to use them in an urban environment because that was where Saddam Hussein put those weapons.’’
Human rights groups want cluster bombs banned because their hundreds of grenade-like explosives scatter widely, sometimes out of combat areas, and can linger for years, detonating unexpectedly.
“From a humanitarian perspective, you don’t use them, because they’re very hard to target,’’ Goose said. He also noted that they have a high failure rate — up to 25 percent — leaving hundreds of bomblets “lying on the ground acting like little land mines.’’
In early April, the CentCom in Qatar began investigating reports that cluster bombs killed 11 civilians in Hillah, a city 60 miles south of Baghdad. Goose said Monday’s statement from CentCom was the first time he heard it confirmed that US commanders had used cluster bombs in Baghdad.
Husain Hamed said one cluster bomb was fired into his Baghdad neighborhood. Four days ago, a group of children, including Hamed’s son, Ali, 10, started playing with what Hamed said turned out to be a small explosive, about the size of a medicine bottle with a hollowed-out bottom.
Two children were killed when it exploded, Hamed said. His son’s stomach was cut open, spilling out his intestines.
Ali lay in a bed at Kadhymia Hospital Monday. Bandages covered his entire stomach and both thighs, which were cut up by the blast. A tube was stuck in his abdomen to drain blood. Another tube in his nostrils feeds Ali, who cannot eat because his bowel is perforated. “There must be some information about bombs so children know not to use it,’’ Husain said. “Anyone can play with it. You can collect them. Suddenly, they will explode.’’
In another Baghdad neighborhood, Saef Sulaiman’s younger brother carried an explosive into the house from outside Friday. Sulaiman, 17, was playing cards when it detonated, blasting shrapnel so deep into his buttocks that it hit bone.
At Raied Mahmod’s stucco townhouse on a dusty residential street in northeastern Baghdad, an unexploded cylindrical munition roughly 3 inches long sat in the corner of his rooftop. Mahmod won’t go near it.
Other explosives fired at his street six days ago gouged chunks of stucco out of the chest-high wall around the rooftop. The roof was punctured in five places by fist-sized holes surrounded by a splattering of small divots. US soldiers have said a pattern of dents around a small hole indicates a cluster-bomb explosion.
Across the street, a sheet of paper taped to a home reads, “Don’t enter the house because there are unexploded bombs.’’
Human rights groups question whether the firing of cluster bombs into densely populated areas violates international law. Advocates say such law prohibits militaries from using weapons indiscriminately.
Some children hurt by explosives cannot get proper medical care because hospitals are operating without electricity — which remains off throughout Baghdad — or full staffing. Many hospital physicians are not going to work because they are afraid of unsafe conditions on the street or because they believe the hospitals are closed, doctors said.
Ali Mustapha, the boy who lost his eyes, could not get a CT scan Monday to help diagnose his deep skull wound because Kadhymia Hospital operates with just one power generator, which is not strong enough to run sophisticated machines, said Saadi, the doctor who treated him. The hospital’s ophthalmology department is closed because ophthalmologists have not come to work. So Mustapha received bare-bones treatment to stop his bleeding and keep him breathing.
