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Iraq Reports by Kelly
Hayes-Raitt
Iraqi Children Are War's
Greatest Casualties
(04/03/03, Baghdad)
Kelly met 12-year-old Sura in
February, 2003, before the war. (Photo by Kelly Hayes-Raitt,
2/03)
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I
met Sura, a 12-year-old Iraqi girl, at Baghdad's Amariyah bomb
shelter, where over 400 men, women, boys and girls like her went to
escape a night of bombing during the '91 Gulf War. A U.S. bomb
pierced the ceiling, curling the 1/2" steel like shaved chocolate,
and incinerated the cowering families.
Trying hard to be grown-up and solemn, this chirpy little girl
showed me blood stains embedded in the concrete, shadowy burns
outlining people's last moments alive, and human flesh still
clinging to the walls. Sura was born the year of the Gulf War.
In her twelve years, she has known nothing but recovering from one
war and preparing for the next.
Now she has a new war from which to recover.
Sura's murky future rests on President Bush's ability to be as
forceful with aid and rebuilding as he has been in bombing and
invading. We've proven we can wage war. Can we
successfully wage peace?
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Before
last week's assaults, Iraqis were still recovering from the
devastation of their last war, from thirteen years of crippling
sanctions and from Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression.
Falling from middle income status to near Third World status in
under a generation, Iraqis are still struggling for medicine,
adequate food, jobs and clean drinking water. Children have
been hit the hardest. Half of the 26 million Iraqis are
children; four thousand are infants or pre-school age.
Childhood diseases have become killers: every other family
loses a child under the age of five, according to UNICEF. The
average child has diarrhea 14 days each month. Childhood
leukemia has skyrocketed, especially in Southern Iraq, where the
U.S. dropped bombs containing depleted uranium in 1991.
Hassan was the entrepreneurial boy stationed outside our hotel who
offered a filmy shoeshine in exchange for a few dinars or
coveted power bars. He is either five or seven depending on
which day I asked, but his memory for which of us carries candy is
flawless. Nearly all Iraqi children were schooled during the
1970s and 1980s. Now, almost a quarter of the children are on
the streets, earning meager money to help support their families.
Iraq's "street" children are bright and funny, not the
vacant-eyed children who descend from generations of poverty and
have little hope of transcending their stations. I teach one
sparkling, dark-eyed girl to touch her nose with her tongue.
Through gleeful laughter, she proudly manages the feat, charming me
into a donation.
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I met Ahmed on the leukemia ward of Baghdad's Al Mansour Pediatric
Teaching Hospital. His mother had left her eight children and
moved into the cot next to her youngest son - "my baby" - to
care for him as he dies. Ahmed is a casualty not only of the
Gulf War, but of the U.N. sanctions. Depleted uranium bombs
were dropped on Ahmed's town in 1991, and contracts delayed by the
U.S. under the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program prevent him from getting
the medicines for his chemotherapy.
As I passed her son's bed, Ahmed's mother grabbed my arm and pulled
me toward her, fervently pleading in Arabic. I thought she
might be begging for medicine, for help, for something for her dying
son. The doctor translated her urgent plea: "We have
everything we need; we just need peace."
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Ahmed and his mother in
February, 2003. (Photo by Kelly Hayes-Raitt) |
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