Children Hardest Hit by Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
The number of Iraqi children who are born underweight or suffer from malnutrition has increased sharply since the US-led invasion, according to a report by Oxfam and a network of about 80 aid agencies.
The report describes a nationwide catastrophe, with around 8 million Iraqis - almost a third of the population - in need of emergency aid. Many families have dropped out of the food rationing system because they have been displaced by fighting and sectarian conflict. Others suffer from the collapse in basic services caused by the exodus of doctors and hospital staff. 
Although the security crisis forced Oxfam and other agencies to withdraw their foreign staff from Iraq to Jordan within a year of the invasion, many Iraqi non-governmental organisations still work in the country and receive supplies from abroad.
“The fighting and weak institutions mean there are severe limits on what humanitarian work can be carried out,” said Jeremy Hobbs, the director of Oxfam International, yesterday as the report, Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq, was published.
But, the report says, more could and should be done to help the Iraqi people. The Iraqi government, in particular, could do more. It should double cash payments for the 1 million families headed by widows from the current $100 (about £49) a month. Nine of every 10 conflict-related deaths since 2003 have been of men, and earlier wars and repression also left many families without a male breadwinner.
At least 4 million Iraqis depend on food assistance, but a third of those who have had to flee their homes in the last year cannot get subsidised rations because they are not registered in a new home. The report urges the government to give the homeless temporary identity cards to allow them to get food.
It calls on western donor governments, which have shifted money out of humanitarian assistance towards reconstruction, to reverse that trend. Most development projects have been forced to slow down or stop anyway, whereas aid money can be spent effectively - and the need is dire.
Forty-three percent of Iraqis are in “absolute poverty”, partly because of a 50% unemployment rate. Basic services in 2003 were poor after a decade of sanctions and under-investment by the Saddam Hussein regime. But they have worsened since. The number of Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies, for example, has risen from 50% in 2003 to 70% now.
Eighty percent lack effective sanitation, and diarrhoeal diseases have increased. Most homes in Baghdad and other cities have only two hours of electricity a day.
Children are suffering the most, with 92% showing learning difficulty because of the pervasive climate of fear. More than 800,000 have dropped out of school, because they now live in camps for the displaced or because schools have had to be taken over to shelter the homeless.
Around 40% of Iraq’s teachers, water engineers, medical staff and other professionals have left the country since 2003.
The Oxfam report comes as Unicef and the UN agency for refugees jointly appealed for $129m to help to get tens of thousands of uprooted Iraqi children back to school. Saying a generation of Iraqis could grow up uneducated and alienated, the agencies presented a plan to support Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon in providing schooling for 155,000 refugees. Altogether, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled to nearby countries. About 500,000 of them are of school age and most currently have limited or no access to education.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
I think that the world needs more “Before and After” picttures of children in Iraq. I feel that the pictures of destruction and suffering would be more potent if people realized more fully what Iraq looked like before we arrived.
“Suffer[let]little children come unto me,for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Math. 19.14,KJam.)
Peace. Peace. Peace, little ones, for the LIGHT weeps with you; ITS anger is roused to the white fire of the Sun.
Beware you killers and torturers of little angels; beware the anger of the LIGHT.
Nur Elohim Magna
Aymon
Thank you for this article. I think that there should be more articles on the condition of the Iraqi victims, so that the people in the US and the West may see what the GREED of the INVADERS has done to the innocent, and also how the GREED has blinded their eyes from seeing the misery, pain and suffering of the “victims”. The Iraqis are the SACRIFICIAL VICTIMS “offered” to appease the TRIUNE GOD of the US and the WEST, that is MAMMON,ACQUISITION, and WEALTH. The WORSHIP of this TRIUNE GOD in the US and the WEST is the cause for the destruction of the lives of innocent people, their properties, future generations of people, the governments of the economically poor countries and the infrastructure. I always wonder how they are able to live COMFORTABLY WITH THE BLOOD MONEY!!!!!!! I leave it to them to think.
I think one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen was a doc called ‘Iraq’s Missing Billions’ at one stage of which a father of two new babies brings them to a hospital for which US contractors were paid over $40 billion to build and there are no medicine stores, no working facilities, no proper sewer drainage or sterilization.
Both of those children died. His newborn son for lack of an antibiotic that was sitting in storage cases at the airport under contractor guard and his newborn daughter for lack of a small vial of surfactant that you only need one vial of to clear the fluid from the lungs of an infant in respiratory distress.
I saw the look on his face and I would not be at all surprised to see that man visiting destruction on American soil.
If those were my children, I’d be right there beside him.
Last year, a study done by Johns Hopkins and a Swiss medical organization reported in The Lancet that the best estimate of Iraqi invasion-related deaths, 41% of them being women and children, was 655,000. A recent study of the additional deaths during the past year places the total number in the neighborhood of 985,000 deaths. This does not include the maimed and sick such as the increasing numbers who will die of cancer due to Depleted Uranium particulate exposures from our weapons used so liberally. BTW- That doesn’t exempt our military from the exposures. Over 440,000 of our troops who served in the first Iraq War are now disabled. Some are already dead. That tells us what the Iraqis’ future will be like.
This makes me feel so helpless……
Urthsong: Thank you for that deadly reminder.
We continue to use DU and have spread thousands of TONS of it in Iraq. If one inhales a single-microscopic-speck of depleted uranium dust, lung cancer is assured. Just one, tiny, invisible speck! It is every place on the planet now, winds have scattered it all over the world and it is now floating in our atmosphere. Have any noted the dramatic decrease of birds this year, and of inscets of all type? Look around and see it that is happening in your part of the world. Yes every child, every human in Iraq is dying from inhaling DU dust, they will live a few more years, but they are all dead.
DU returns to land to kill when it rains. It is impossible to clean it up and it will be deadly for over four billion years. DU is indestructable, it kills and re-kills and it is likely too late to reverse the on-going damage to all of life on this once beautiful, blue and white water planet. The only one known to exist in the entire universe.
Throw you later.___ Oh, that’s American slang for saying,__ see you later.