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Iraqi Children Bear the Costs of War
The great number of Iraqi children affected with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the saddest, and least known, legacies of the Iraq war. That a new clinic for their treatment opened last August in Baghdad is the first of its kind says a lot about how this problem is being addressed. Until now, hundreds of children suffering from PTSD have been treated by Dr. Haider Maliki at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands remain untreated.
Dr. Maliki, who is the only child psychiatrist in the entire country working at a government hospital, hasn't even been trained as a child psychiatrist and only took up the position when he saw the tremendous needs for that kind of professional in the country. It is well known that children are particularly vulnerable to stress, violence, and displacement.
Hardly a week still passes by in Iraq without renewed signs of violence that leave both children and adults with permanent mental scars. Dr. Haithi Al Sady, Dean of the Psychological Research Center at Baghdad University has been studying the effects of PTSD in Iraqi children. According to him, 28 percent of Iraqi children suffer some degree of PTSD, and their numbers are steadily rising. It is easy to see children's psychological status being affected by daily explosions, killings, abductions, threatening noises and turmoil in Iraq's main cities.
PTSD in children can affect their brain and lead to long term effects that will alter their development. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that children with PTSD were likely to experience a decrease in the size of the brain area known as hippocampus, which is a brain structure important in memory processing and emotion.
Stress sustained over a long period of time is likely to cause more serious effects. More than half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by conflict, according to a 2003 UNICEF report.
UNICEF states that almost two million children have been displaced from their homes since the last war began. "Iraqi children, already casualties of a quarter of a century of conflict and deprivation, are being caught up in a rapidly worsening humanitarian tragedy, "according to that organization. "Iraqi children are paying far too high a price," stated Roger Wright, UNICEF's Special Representative for Iraq in December of 2007.
Information collected by UNICEF from different sources support his assertion. By the end of 2007, approximately 75,000 children had resorted to living in camps or temporary shelters. Many of the 220,000 displaced children of primary school age had their education interrupted. This is in addition to the estimated 760,000 children already out of primary school in 2006. Hundreds of children held in prison -some as young as nine-years-old- are kept in overcrowded cells and are frequent targets of sexual abuse by prison guards, according to information from current and former child prisoners.
Both the United States and Great Britain are recognized as Iraq's occupying powers, and as such are bound by the Hague and Geneva Conventions that demand that they be responsible not only for maintaining order, but also for responding to the medical needs of the population. Children's mental health is among the most urgent of those needs.
What is now needed is to increase funding to UNICEF and other organization working with children and vulnerable groups in Iraq. New clinics addressing the mental health needs of children should be created. In addition, U.S., British, and other European professionals with experience in working in conflict situations and with PTSD-affected children can give valuable assistance. A generation of Iraqi children has already paid too high a price for this sinister war.
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7 Comments so far
Show AllSeems a fair comment to me. But funding UNICEF or any of these aid agencies does not unless their delivery of services is 95 cents on the dollar.
Someone sent to me an interesting video of animals in an animal shelter. It showed a Lab who had given birth to pups that were then adopted breast feeding a number of kittens and protecting them from harm.
It showed a cat nursing a young fawn.
What was most interesting was the video of a leopard in the wilds that had killed an adult baboon to eat, then discovered the baboons baby hiding in the grass. The Leopard adopted the baby baboon.
The contrast struck me. Here we have animals taking care of the babies of other species via an unexplained "Mothering Instinct" and here we have Humans, supposedly higher up the evolutionary ladder justifying dropping bombs on CHILDREN of another people .
Hey, now. We aren't dropping bombs on CHILDREN. We are dropping bombs on COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Big difference. The first is an act of state terrorism. The U.S. does not do state terrorism, or torture, for that matter. Collateral damage is just the unfortunate result of a war to protect American interests. Get with the program.
d.k.shaw
Bring America Back !!!! Hey Now !! Intentionally firing 40,000 laser guided missiles and bombs into a defenseless sovereign Nation. Right !! You betcha in your military mind there will be collateral damages. You are the collateral damage of a runaway out-of-control US military - industrial complex !
It is something so obvious and so unreported.
In John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, there is a chapter about Afghanistan. He had been visiting a couple villages that had been bombed by the u.s. In Kabul he visited a bombed high school, where the students were trying to carry on in makeshift classrooms of cardboard and plastic sheeting. The headmaster explained to him that the kids could no longer remember their lessons, that everything had to be repeated over and over.
"...because the young have been emotionally invaded and left with only anguish. They constantly worry about shells or bomb attacks, or stepping on a mine; they are terrified of aircraft. These wars have taken away our minds, and the spirit of our lives, and left us with only the shells of our bodies."
I never heard anyone express it as eloquently as this Afghan teacher. And the true magnitude of this Afghanistan horror is that this happens to everyone in the entire country. All the people of Afghanistan have been emotionally invaded. They have all had their minds taken away, and the spirit of their lives.
We supported Saddam and his brutality, including the bloody 8 year war with Iran, up till the First Gulf War, when we inflicted numerous casualties and committed numerous atrocities in Iraq. We urged the Shia and Kurds to rebel, promised them help, then left them to Saddam's tender mercies. We imposed brutal, illegal sanctions that cost the lives of well over 500,000 children. Then we came in for another orgy of bloodletting with over a million dead, millions more physically After our 29 year torment of the Iraqi people, one would think that we'd understand why people in that part of the world hate us so much, but no, we're planning to stay on indefinitely dominating, manipulating, terrifying.
We tore Afghanistan apart by inducing the Soviets to invade, stoking fundamentalist militarism and arming the militants, creating the Taliban and al Qaeda and then, when the snake we had hatched turned on us and bit us, invading the country and bringing more carnage and turmoil. Not content to limit ourselves to that hapless nation, we're now gleefully destabilizing Pakistan and continuing to support Israel's bloodbaths in Palestine.
I'm an American professor of critical care medicine working in another Muslim country, Bangladesh, caring for the poorest of the poor. People here are perplexed that folks as nice and helpful as most of the Americans they meet could support policies so cruel. Their attitudes are more nuanced than you'd expect, and more nuanced than those of most Americans towards Muslims.
Nonetheless, radicalism and anti-Americanism are rising. Antisemitism has hit a fevered pitch. And yet, the majority of us are still convinced that they hate us for our freedom and virtue.