GENEVA, 15 May 2003 — More than 300,000 Iraqi children face death from acute malnutrition, twice as many as before US and British forces invaded the country in March, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) agency warned yesterday. Many of these — nearly eight percent of all Iraqi children under five — could be saved if the occupation forces ensured that aid convoys could move around freely and kept looters away from water plants and pipelines, it said.
The agency, charged with protecting children around the globe, said a survey taken in Baghdad indicated that 7.7 percent of children under five in urban centers were suffering from acute malnutrition, nearly twice as many as one year ago.
Acute malnutrition, which is believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis during the 10 years of economic sanctions imposed on the regime of ousted President Saddam Hussein, means a child is wasting away.
“We knew going into the war that Iraqi children were poorly nourished,” said UNICEF representative in Baghdad Carel de Rooy. “But these findings make clear that not enough is being done to turn the situation around.
“Instead, it has gotten worse,” said de Rooy, whose comments were issued by the UNICEF office in Geneva. Unsafe drinking water was playing a major role in the crisis. “We know the risks that Iraq’s children face, and we know what to do. But we are humanitarian workers, not police. Secure aid delivery equals effective aid delivery.” But, he declared, weeks after US and British troops took control of Iraq: “We are still calling on somebody to deliver that security.”
Meanwhile, Iraqi families wailed with grief yesterday as they picked through piles of bones at a vast mass grave, their relatives among up to 15,000 people reported missing in the area during Saddam Hussein’s rule. People searched for faded identity cards or other clues among the skeletons to try to identify brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and even children who disappeared when Saddam’s government cracked down on a Shiite uprising in 1991.
Some locals reported hearing gunfire from the site near the farming community of Mahawil, about 90 km south of Baghdad, in that year. “We saw buses bringing people here daily during May and April, 1991 and at night we heard the gunfire,” said Saied Jaber, who lives in the area.
Other residents said they saw trucks full of corpses drawing up at the site, which may be one of the largest of a string of remote mass graves uncovered since US-led forces ousted Saddam last month.
Desperate for a conclusion to more than 10 years of worry about the fate their loved ones, some people claimed remains on the basis of scraps of evidence: hair, a sandal, even a packet of cigarettes. Others silently studied scraps of clothing or items such as wallets, eyeglasses and even an artificial leg among the bones.
As an earth mover scraped heaps of rich brown earth from the site, bones protruded from the dirt. Once extricated, skulls and what looked like the bones from the rest of the bodies were heaped into crumbled piles or stuffed into plastic bags.
Clothing hung from the bones. Some skulls were cracked. Some of the remains were clearly those of children.
Many families stood silently behind a ring of barbed wire coils separating them from the excavation to try to preserve the site but others walked through the piles. There were no forensic experts present and human rights groups fear that evidence of atrocities could be lost forever.
