BAGDHAD, 24 April 2003 — Anyone watching the television news over the past week could be forgiven for thinking that the conflict in Iraq is done and dusted and that — after the loss of 160 British and American soldiers and an estimated 5,600 Iraqi soldiers and civilians — it falls into the category of another small victorious war.
Yes, we know there has been collateral damage. No one who has seen them could forget the horrifying pictures, published all over the world, of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, the boy who lost his parents after his house took a direct hit from an American bomb and whose arms were so badly burned that they had to be amputated. But he has now been flown to Kuwait for treatment, after several newspapers launched appeals on his behalf. Consciences salved, we can all forget about the rest of the anonymous Iraqi dead and injured. Or can we? In fact, as one Iraqi doctor told me: “There are many, many Alis. On the TV and in the newspapers you saw only one patient, but that’s just show business. There are thousands of others with very severe injuries and thousands more with psychological damage.”
Certainly, the war has not ended for Ali Mustapha. He still had his eyesight when the American tanks rolled into Baghdad and when Donald Rumsfeld stood up and chastized the world’s press for giving too much attention to the chaos and anarchy on the streets and not enough to his liberation of the Iraqi people from a vile dictator. Now Ali is writhing in pain in a fly-blown Baghdad hospital in which his only comfort is the touch of his mother, Munar, who sits cross-legged on his iron bed in a black chador, desperately trying to soothe her son’s fear and agony.
This is not easy for her. She can’t stroke his face because the only exposed parts are a tuft of hair and a chin covered in three large red blisters. The rest of his head is wrapped in a large bandage. And much of his body is torn, battered and sore. Not that there was much of it in the first place: He is only five years old.
Nor has the war ended for 11-year-old Hanan Yusfieh, who lost her left foot on 15 April when she poked a stick at a device she found while herding sheep. Or for 12-year-old Ali Mahdi Kathum, whose left shoulder and arm were shredded when a bomb that he and some friends found in a street blew up on April 19. He hasn’t yet been told that the explosion killed his cousin and two friends. Or for 13-year-old Mohammed Sabbah, who picked up a grenade in the street last Friday — it blew off most of his right hand. And there are more, none of whom have much chance of first-class medical treatment in Kuwait — like the famous Ali with no arms.
These are children whose injuries will not be plastered over the world’s newspapers, but whose lives have been hideously scarred through no fault of their own, beyond suffering from a natural tendency to be curious or playful. All have been maimed after the fighting between the US and Iraqi forces ended, and after President Bush had announced that they were free and that the good times could begin.
Ali Mustapha was blown up on 14 April because he and his siblings wanted to know more about an odd-looking object that had landed in his garden. The explosion also burned and blasted the face of his younger brother Hassan, 13-year-old Yassin, another brother, and his sister Senab, 15. All of them are now in hospital elsewhere in Baghdad. “I just heard an explosion, a very loud explosion, and that was it,” said Munar as she cools her little boy by waving a green plastic fan over his body. He is lying, wriggling unhappily on a rough cloth in a bare and grubby ward. Iraq hospitals are not pleasant places.
Ali’s medical papers say that he was blinded, injured in the chest and upper and lower limbs and suffered damage to brain tissue. They categorically state that this was caused by a cluster bomb, a device the Americans have admitted dropping, and which they used liberally in the 1991 Gulf War, but whose deployment against civilians is illegal under international law. This is very hard to prove definitively. Dr Emad Al-Mashhadani, the chief doctor at Kadhimiya Academic Hospital, where Ali is being treated, has no doubts that this was the weapon. Nor has Ali’s father, Mustapha, a laborer. The latter is a burly gentle-faced man who does not rage against the Americans and the British, as you might expect in these circumstances, beyond remarking softly that they use “strange” weapons. It appears that he does not want to say anything that might spoil the chances of getting help for his boy. “All I want is some treatment for him, any help from anywhere in the world that can make him see again.” His son is one of a number of children lying in misery in the hospitals of Baghdad. More are certain to follow as there is a great quantity of ordnance and abandoned Iraqi weaponry lying around and very little sign at street-level of efforts by the American forces to warn people — especially children — not to touch it.
These Iraqi medical men who spoke to me are not ideologues or propagandists. In fact, only a week ago one of the doctors was very nearly killed by an American tank out on the streets — it fired dozens of bullets into his car as he was traveling to work early in the morning. “I took them by surprise. They didn’t see me. It was a mistake.” He still has fragments of glass in his head.
We do the rounds together, meeting one horribly injured child after another. He shows me Hanan Yusfieh, the sheep-herding girl who has lost her foot. She is an emaciated pale child, curled up on her bed staring up with eyes so tired and dead that they appeared almost to be cynical.
He shows me a two-year-old boy with a severely injured arm, called Hamed Sabar, whose mother is — like that of Ali Mustapha — sitting cross-legged on his bed, trying desperately to soothe the pain. Finally I tell the doctor that I can no longer stand it, and ask how he stops himself from cracking up. “Ah, we get used to it,” he replies, “We have to. We know that there is more of this for months to come.”
