Insurgentjg

Desperate plight of Iraq’s childrenI was in London five years back, working as a teacher’s assistant for the children with learning difficulties and belonging to displaced families – refugees settled in shelters. In my group I had six kids from Somalia and a boy named Ali from Iraq. Ali shared the same fate of many in most of the war trodden areas of the world.

Today when I was presented with a task to write about “War in Iraq”, I had a flashback of all those moments when in the middle of a lesson, kids of no more then eight or nine years of age, burst into tears for the fear that someone will break open the door to take them away or how a big bang few blocks away has changed the pattern of their lives forever, taking away their parents, uncles, aunts, siblings and friends!

I have chosen few of the recent reports to examine the impact of fifth year of immense scale of death, destruction and oppression wrecked by the US occupation on Iraqi children. Current situation confirms that US operations in Iraq and other regions are the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.

The Independent (British daily) estimated that as many as 260,000 children have died since March 2003. According to UNICEF, 10 percent of Iraqi children under five are acutely malnourished, while another 20 percent are chronically malnourished. For those children, who do live to see their fifth birthday, Iraq has become a hostile and often deadly environment.

Before the invasion there was 100 percent attendance in the schools and now less then a third of Iraqi children go to school, a mere trip to school is a deadly risk. On the other hand, ruthless killings have left thousands of Iraqi children being orphans and homeless. UN’s IRIN news agency reports that; “Thousands of homeless children throughout Iraq…survive by begging, stealing or scavenging garbage for food. Only four years ago, the vast majority of these children were living at home with their families.”

The present war is not only killing the present generation but has traumatised the entire young generation – which will have the more far reaching effect upon Iraqi society. A survey of 1000 school children, by the association of Iraqi psychologists, has found that 92 percent of children had learning impediments caused by the climate of violence and fear.

Iraqi mothers and children face a grave humanitarian crises, before the war it was years of repression, internal conflicts and external sanctions. Report by Save the Children states that number of children dying is higher than when the country was under UN economic sanctions in 1990, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which continued till 2003. “Sanctions enforced by the UN on Iraq since the Gulf War have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, including over half a million children - many of whom weren’t even born when the Gulf War began and now the imposed war”, a documentary film by John Pilger “Paying The Price: Killing The Children Of Iraq” states all about the plight of Iraqi children and their marked future and may be of many of us in times to come.