Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2007-09-02 23:41. Evidence | By Ahmed Ali, Inter Press Service

BAQUBA, Sep 2 (IPS) - The violence around the continuing U.S. military operations in this city has robbed children of their childhood.

Only two provincial schools and one private kindergarten school are functioning in this city of 280,000, located 50 km north of Baghdad. Most children know neither school nor play.

Or even the food they want. "We parents can hardly meet the basic requirements of food," Mahdi Hassan, a father of four, told IPS.

"Nobody even mentions chocolate or pastries or anything else because Iraqis know they are not important," Baquba resident Wissam Jafar told IPS. "Children eat what the other members of the family eat. Toys and games are offered only at festivals and on special occasions."

Baquba city, capital of Diyala province, has been at the centre of major U.S. military operations to fight al-Qaeda like forces. People have suffered from the violence from both sides.

By now Iraq has seen a generation of children pass with just survival a major issue. During the period of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, more than half a million children died, according to the United Nations.
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WOUNDS BELOW THE SURFACE

Professor Kholoud Nasser Muhssin of the University of Baghdad points out that approximately 60–70% of all Iraqi children suffer from psychological problems. Many of them have also survived traumatic experiences. Psychological wounds are difficult to heal and post-traumatic stress disorder is very common. “New generations, especially this one, will be aggressive,” points out the Baghdad psychiatrist Bilal Youssif Hamid. Many children whom Hamid has tried to treat have witnessed or participated in murders and death. Although parents are frequently too afraid to take their children to a clinic for a medical check-up, much less to school, even the children who go to school have great learning difficulties, as well as anxiety, depression, aggressiveness, nightmares, bedwetting etc. War is always catastrophic for the human psyche.

By Yehonathan Tommer | Published: 6 January 2008 10:42pm

Despite American optimism at Iraq's gradual stabilisation, local officials and international aid workers are concerned at the alarming countrywide numbers of missing and disappeared Iraqi children, unwittingly sold by poverty-stricken parents to child traffickers for the sex industry, cheap labour and organ transplants on the black market.

Omar Khalif, vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA) told Aljazeera news agency that at least two children are sold every week and another four are reported missing. The numbers have increased by 20% over 2006.
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Many children can be sold for as little as USD3000 ($3500 Australian) while babies can fetch as much as USD30,000 ($35000 Australian) a senior Interior Ministry official told the Arab English language network.

"Extreme poverty and nationwide unemployment have pushed desperate and anguished parents into the unthinkable and many believe that they can save their children's lives to guarantee them a better future by giving them up for adoption," Mahmoud Saeed, a senior official at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs said.
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By Shea Howell | Friday, JAN 18, 2008

Those of us who live in cities like Detroit know something about the erosion of our souls when confronted with violence. On a daily basis we see the shattering of children who see too much, endure too much, lose too much of the safety and security that they have every right to expect from the adult world.

It is because of the children, both here and in Iraq, that we must end this war and repudiate the ways of thinking that got us into it.

Even for a media weary of reporting violence and wary of serious critiques of the Bush surge, the failure to confront the latest reports on the state of Iraq’s children is astonishing.

In the midst of the death of Benazir Bhutto and the build-up to the Iowa primary, the media seemed incapable of helping us focus on the catastrophe of Iraq’s children.

Two weeks ago the anti-corruption board in Iraq revealed that 5 million children are now orphaned there. This staggering number of lives fractured by violence was reported after official governmental statistics were gathered and presented at a conference in Baghdad. Moussa Faraj, the anti-corruption board chief, said “The government should set up an institutional or legislative program to help the Iraqi orphans. Iraq is an oil rich country and it is not acceptable that its orphans remain groaning in tragedy.”
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In 2004, a survey by the World Food Program (WFP) found that at least 6.5 million Iraqis were highly dependent on the food ration and a further 3.9 million would become “food insecure” without it. The WFP estimated that at least 27 percent of Iraqi children were already suffering chronic malnutrition. Many of the poorest Iraqis were not consuming their ration, but selling part on the market to help get the money necessary for other essentials such as clothes and rent.

More than three years on, Oxfam International estimates that just 60 percent of Iraqis are still able to pick up their ration, compared with 96 percent in 2004. Security concerns prevent large numbers of people from going to nearby distribution centres. Sectarian militias fostered by the US occupation use the allocation of food as part of the systems of patronage they preside over. The WFP has announced this year that it will try to provide emergency food relief to more than 750,000 Iraqis who have been displaced by violence and cannot access the PDS.

Those who can reach distribution centres find that many do not have items in stock due to delivery delays and shortages caused by the wholesale theft. The quantity of food available has fallen by 35 percent under US occupation, according to experts cited by the IRIN UN newsagency. The quality has also sharply deteriorated, with people expected to consume substandard products or items past their expiry date.
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