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Children will pay the price { April 9 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-639676,00.htmlhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-639676,00.html
Iraq
April 09, 2003
Iraq's children will pay ultimate price of war
Foreign Editor's Briefing by Bronwen Maddox
THE despairing face of Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old boy who lost both arms in the blast that killed his entire family, has become a symbol around the world of the casualties of the Iraq war.
The United States is something of an exception to that; the picture has made an appearance of sorts — in Time magazine, for one — but the war pages of the national newspapers this week have been illustrated almost entirely with pictures of Marines crossing bridges and of Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, professing caution about progress, but looking pleased.
All the same, now that American troops are in Baghdad and the number of civilian casualties is rising, there are questions about whether that death toll will cost the US support, and what the lasting effect of 23 years of war will be on Iraqis, particularly children who have known nothing else.
Yesterday doctors from the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) visiting southern Iraq said that they had seen “incredible” levels of civilian casualties. In the town of al-Hillah, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, they reported seeing a lorry arriving at the hospital to deliver the dismembered dead bodies of “dozens” of women and children, said to have been killed in bombing at al- Nasiriyah.
“There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of al-Hillah,” one of the six Red Cross doctors in Baghdad said yesterday.
The Iraqi Government has claimed 1,250 dead and 5,000 injured. But no one from US or British forces or from independent international organisations has yet made a formal estimate for the number of dead and injured Iraqis, either civilian or military.
The ICRC says that it would be handicapped in its work on the ground in treating the wounded if it got embroiled in a partisan debate about the exact numbers killed. “If there are violations of international humanitarian law, we will make our representations to the authorities, but you won’t know about it,” a spokeswoman said yesterday, reasserting the organisation’s principles of confidentiality and impartiality.
In any case, the ICRC’s small teams have been confined mainly to Baghdad and Basra. But at the weekend, the ICRC reported from Basra that during the first three days of fighting around the city, hospitals were seeing 100 wounded a day; since then, that has fallen to two or three dozen.
In Baghdad, the World Health Organisation has reported that hospitals were seeing 100 combat casualties an hour when the first American tanks burst into the city, and that they were having to perform amputations with inadequate anaesthetic. Yesterday the WHO said: “Nobody is checking every single hospital, nobody is adding up all the numbers . . . (but) there clearly is a large volume of civilian casualties.”
The Pentagon, defending the hits on central Baghdad, said yesterday that bombing was careful and restrained.
For Iraqi military deaths, there are no formal tallies, but Pentagon aides have privately suggested figures of several thousand. In most countries, these cause less outrage than civilian deaths. But the Iraqi Army has relied so heavily on conscripts (and there are so many anecdotes in this war of Iraqi soldiers being forced to fight at gunpoint) that the distinction is blurred.
The WHO has given warning of the psychological damage to Iraqi children from the casualties, all the more because of the heavy reliance on conscripts who may have wanted nothing to do with the war. According to Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 274,000 are conscripted every year. There are no good estimates of how many Iraqi children have been left without parents by the three wars that President Saddam Hussein has waged in the past 23 years. Deaths of Iraqi soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War are put at more than 10,000; those in the 1980-88 war with Iran are thought to be much higher, although estimates vary widely.
For most Iraqis, that means they will have known only war in their lives. Nearly 18 million people, about 77 per cent of the population, are under the age of 35. More than 70 per cent are under 25. It follows, too, that they have known only Saddam as leader of Iraq.
Optimists might say that the young people of Iraq will be particularly glad to see an end to the killing and to Saddam’s regime itself. It will allow them a more hopeful future than they could otherwise have expected. But their reactions may not be that straightforward. As the WHO was arguing, if their families have been destroyed, they will be disorientated and furious. It would be no surprise if they blamed the US rather than Saddam for their personal tragedies.
Most seriously, for those who are sitting in the Pentagon and State Department sketching out plans for bringing Iraq quickly back to its pre-1980 levels of prosperity and sophistication, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are too young to have any memory of that time.
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