The following article exposes a disgraceful situation. It is unfathomable that a country as rich as ours does not provide basic foodstuffs and medical care to the Iraqi people. We could also repair of sewage and electrical systems that we destroyed in the First Gulf War. It’s been seventeen years!
The Iraqi people, once a proud and wealthy country with subsidized health care and education to the highest levels, has been decimated by two brutal and barbaric attacks, one in 1991, the other in 2003. There are apparently no serious efforts to put the country back on its feet.
After five years it rings hollow to say that the Bush Administration is merely incompetent, or to blame the victims, as Americans are wont to do. At a certain point one has to admit the possibility that the policy might well be destruction of the country, of scattering its factions to the winds, this to allow for for permanent military occupation and thereby control of its oil.
That Iraqi people happen to live atop that oil? That is the problem. They’ve been a damned incovenience from the very start.
I challenge any who have, by display of bumper-stickers and other courageous acts, supported this war. Defend, if you would, the unconscionable human toll that has followed the military occupation and conquest of Iraq, 1990 to present.
Inter Press Service
By Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali*BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) – Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.
The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.
But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.
A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent. It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.
According to a UN Children’s Fund report released this month, “at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases.”
IPS interviewed three children from different districts of Baquba, the capital city of Iraq’s volatile Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.
Firas Muhsin is seven, and lives in Baquba with his mother. His father was killed two years ago by militants who shot him in his shop.
Firas attends school four hours every day near his house. On rare occasions he gets to play with neighbours’ children, but always under the eyes of his mother.
Firas is allowed to move no more than ten metres from the house; his mother is afraid of strangers. Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.
Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq’s unstable environment.
Omar Khalif is vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of the missing and trafficked. He told reporters in January that on average at least two Iraqi children are sold by their parents every week. In addition, another four are reported missing every week.
“The numbers are alarming,” Khalif said. “There is an increase of 20 percent in the reported cases of missing children over a year.”
Firas spends hours each day sitting at the door looking at people. The door is his only outlet. In the afternoon, his mother calls him inside to do his homework. After dinner, his big hope is to watch cartoons — if there is electricity from their private generator.
The mother faces a shortage of kerosene needed just for heating. “My children feel cold and I cannot afford kerosene,” she told IPS.
Many children Firas’s age do not get to school at all. According to the UN, 17 percent of Iraqi children are permanently out of primary school, and an estimated 220,000 more are missing school because they and their families have been displaced. That adds up to 760,000 children out of primary school in 2006.
These are in-country figures, and do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and youth whose education is interrupted or ended because their families have fled to other countries. UNHCR estimates that at least 2.25 million Iraqis have fled their country.
Qusay Ameen is five, and lives with his mother, father, two sisters and a brother. His father was a sergeant in the former military, and is now unemployed. He receives a monthly pension of 110 dollars. He tries to support the family by selling cigarettes on the roadside. Qusay’s mother is a housekeeper. Qusay hopes to begin school next year when he turns six.
After breakfast, always something simple like fried tomato with bread, Qusay wants to play, but he has nothing to play with but a small broken plastic car his brother found near the neighbour’s door. He spends most of the morning playing with this car. He seems happiest when he gets to visit his neighbour’s house, because they have a swing in the garden.
Like most Iraqi children now, Qusay has grown used to being in need. He rarely gets sweets, or new clothes.
The family house is incredibly small — one bedroom and a place used as both kitchen and bathroom. Everyone sleeps in one room, which is extremely cold through the winter months. There are not enough beds or covering, and everyone has to sleep close together for warmth.
The house has few basic necessities, and of course no television or useful household appliances. There is a small kerosene cooker used for both cooking and heating.
According to the UN Children’s Fund, only 40 percent of children nationwide have access to safe drinking water, and only 20 percent of people outside Baghdad have a working sewerage service. About 75,000 children are among families living in temporary shelters.
Ali Mahmood, 6, has lived with his uncle in Baquba after his parents were killed by a mortar explosion two years ago in random shelling by militants. Next year he will join primary school near his uncle’s house.
Ali’s days are alike, and quiet. His only friends are his uncle’s children. When they go to school, he simply spends his time alone. It does seem the uncle’s family is not able to look after him as well as his own might have. His uncle Thamir is doing his best, but life is difficult, and Thamir has responsibility for a big family.
Ali is deprived of just about everything in childhood; he has no place to play, or things to play with. And he has nobody to think of his future.
And already, he has responsibilities waiting; he has been told he must take care of his younger brother when he grows up.
Firas, Qusay and Ali are all children, but none the way children should be.
(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)
Piece of Mindful 
This post should be combined with your last one.
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Them damned on-the-ground correspondents don’t know diddly, do they.
I’m always amazed, Swede, at your standards of evidence. For those who in any way criticize the U.S., you set high barriers, literally impossible to achieve. You presume they are lying, have ulterior motives, hate America. For the U.S. government and its toadies, your standards of evidence are as follows:
1. None.
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IPS was on the ground and interviewed three children, yep that sounds about right, next they’ll tell us Soros picked up the tab.
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IPS is a news reporting organization that has done what US “reporters” do not – news that is censored in this country, as reported by The United Nations, Save the Children, the United Nations Children’s Fund, Iraq Families Association, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That’s what real reporters do. We don’t have any here.
As one who followed the fate of the Iraqi people during the sanctions regime, I can testify that things ain’t rosy over there. No matter what these viral emails released by the military tell you.
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Lets talk about your standards Mark, on one hand a video release of BHO minister’s sermons is propaganda, a release of surveys/studies by the UN, or anyone else with known agendas, is God’s honest truth.
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Mr. Obama was on a plane on the other side of the country when the speech was made. He didn’t write it, didn’t listen to it, doesn’t agree with it, should not be affected by it. But it is inflammatory, so his political opponents, using guilt by association, release it in order to achieve maximum political damage. High standards you’re using there.
On the other hand, the bodies I mentioned above are serious fact-gathering agencies. They exist for the welfare of their clients and report on their condition. Unless you can establish that they have political motivations by some other standard than becuase they are reporting on the results of American activities, you got nothing.
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First of all the Rev’s anti-American, anti-white, conspiratorial comments were not made all on one Sunday, they were repeated many times on several occasions. You could have reviewed them but know Utube has pulled them.
Secound of all I’m just as suspect of knowledge, reports, surveys comming out of Iraq as you are of our miltary reports. Back when you argued for the Lancet study I found this quote, nevered used it so I’ll provide it now.
“John Tirman, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Lafta as “a medical doctor, a professor of medicine. Those factors were a sufficient level of credibility. I never asked [Lafta] about his political views.” Tirman commissioned the Lancet II survey with $46,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and additional support from other funders.
Lancet Editor Richard Horton shares this fundamental faith in scientists. He told NJ that scientists, including Lafta, can be trusted because “science is a global culture that operates by a set of norms and standards that are truly international, that do not vary by culture or religion. That’s one of the beautiful aspects of science — it unifies cultures, not divides them.”
Still, the authors have declined to provide the surveyors’ reports and forms that might bolster confidence in their findings. Customary scientific practice holds that an experiment must be transparent — and repeatable — to win credence. Submitting to that scientific method, the authors would make the unvarnished data available for inspection by other researchers. Because they did not do this, citing concerns about the security of the questioners and respondents, critics have raised the most basic question about this research: Was it verifiably undertaken as described in the two Lancet articles?
“The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data,” said David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as “curb-stoning,” sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result. Another possibility is that the teams went primarily into neighborhoods controlled by anti-American militias and were steered to homes that would provide information about the “crimes” committed by the Americans.”
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First of all, the reverend Obama did not make the goddamned comments. Guilt by association. Aren’t you getting that?
Secondly, it is my understanding that the Lancet study data was made available. though the study itself is not repeatable for obvious reasons.
Your mention of George Soros is just plain weird. If you are so inclined to doubt evidence based on funding sources, then you should never again cite anything from Heritage or Cato. But of course, since you don’t like the outcome, you are exercising critical thought skills. That’s nice, though not a normal practice for you. You’re rather selective about that.
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Tell you what, if The Heritage or Cato’s dog eats the study data, I’ll consider it bogus like Lancet.
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I’d be willing to bet that you found a joint US Iraqi study that said we have ‘only’ killed a quarter million or so credible, and have not checked it any further or expressed reservations. You’re so predictable.
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