BAGHDAD, 26 April 2003 — Eleven-year-old Zena sits on the floor in the corner of her dismal dormitory drawing an elaborate pattern on her arm with a ball-point pen. She has little else to do. Like so many other places in Baghdad, her home, an institute for abandoned children, was looted after US troops swept in and Iraqi authority crumbled.
Thieves took everything — beds, chairs, tables, books, a television set, electrical sockets and door frames. They may even have taken Zena’s friends. Out of some 200 children, only half remain, now living under the authority of Islamic clerics who took over the running of Dar Al-Rahma, or “home of mercy”, after its directors vanished.
The new head, Sheikh Bakr Al-Saidi, said the children, many of them former street traders brought to the center by police, simply ran away. But the spokesman in Baghdad for UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, thinks at least some of them were abducted by the looters.
“We think that some of them were taken, and are now in the hands of gangs,” UNICEF spokesman Hatim George Hatim told Reuters. “We are extremely concerned for their welfare. We’ve found several children and brought them back. We think some of the girls had been abused.”
Zena, brought to the center by police 18 months ago after her parents abandoned her, has little to say. “I hid in a room when the looters came,” she said, dressed in a grubby white T-shirt and long skirt. “I don’t know what happened to everybody, I didn’t ask.”
Saidi was reluctant to discuss the fate of the missing children and refused to identify any who had been returned. “When the war started the gate was open and the children ran away,” he said. “We are concerned, we want to get them back.”
Saidi said the looting was led by the center’s former director, Mohammed Habib, an official of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, who came with a gang to empty the complex on Baghdad’s southwestern edge and set light to store rooms holding records. “He was the man responsible for the children and he was the man responsible for this,” said Saidi, stepping through charred papers on the floor of a smoke-blackened room. “Now the mosque has taken over everything, even supplying money for food.”
The clerics have confined girls to their dormitories, screened from boys playing football in the corridor by heavy gray blankets. Khaidar Ali, skillful with a ball, says he misses his best friend Muhammad Ali, who disappeared in the looting mayhem.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” said Khaidar, 17, kicked out of home by his stepmother seven years ago. “I think they are looking for him.”
The children are given two meals a day of rice and soup, some sleep in metal-framed bunk beds, others on mattresses on the floor. Despite the privations the children have faced since the looting, they say it is a better place without Habib. “He was an angry man, full of nerves and revenge,” Khaidar said. “He used to beat me and he wouldn’t let us play football. If Muhammad knows Habib is gone, maybe he will come back.”
