BAGHDAD, 8 September 2003 — Iraq’s children were the first victims of the sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War, and now they are paying the heaviest price in the chaos that has followed the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Deprived of basics by the international isolation of the country and used as a symbol by Saddam’s propaganda machine, Iraqi children continue to suffer from the same ills in the troubled “peace” that has followed his overthrow by US-led forces in April.
They fall prey to diarrhea, infection, malnutrition and other diseases — illnesses that are the result of poverty and would easily be prevented if their families had access to clean water and proper food.
Five-month-old Ali’s emaciated body appears all the more fragile in the large bed in Baghdad’s Aliwiya children’s hospital where he has been laid up for the past week. He weighs just three kilograms.
“That’s half what he should weigh at his age,” says a nurse standing by his bed.
Ali’s mother, who has four other children, says her husband earns 10,000 dinars — about $5— a month, which is not enough for her to buy the powdered milk he needs. A half-kilogram costs about 500 dinars.
“The pipes that bring the water to our house were hit during the war. They still haven’t been repaired and the water we get isn’t good,” she says, as she tries to soothe her crying infant.
The hospital ward is filled with mothers, most of them dressed in traditional black robes like her. They chase the flies away from their children’s faces or fan them in the stifling hot room.
“We teach them how to rehydrate the children and how to boil water correctly to prevent diarrhea,” says resident pediatrician Ali Abdelhassan Shahi.
“But there’s not much we can do about the extreme poverty that is the real cause of these illnesses. The situation now is much worse than before the war and many of these children will likely be back in hospital again.”
Before the war there were a million Iraqi children under five — a quarter of their age-group — suffering from chronic malnutrition, according to figures from UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency.
“The food they eat lacks vitamins, the water is not clean, there are power cuts, poverty and lack of preventative medicine,” says pediatrician Shahi. “These things existed before the war but things are getting worse by the day now.”
In 1989, 51 out of every 1,000 children would die, mostly due to respiratory illnesses or diarrhea. The figure reached 131 a decade later.
Last year malnutrition among children under five fell to four percent, but it has shot back up again to seven percent since the war, according to UNICEF.
Another issue facing Iraqi children is the munitions left over after the war. Children are often attracted to the bright metal “bomblets” that fall out of cluster bombs and often do not explode.
UNICEF says about 1,000 children were killed by leftover munitions in the weeks immediately after the war effectively ended on April 9.
