Children of U.S. occupation

[babylonsister]

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=5285§ionid=3510304

Children of U.S. occupation
Sat, 07 Apr 2007 20:36:54
Hassan Tavakoli, Press TV, Tehran

What has Bush brought for the children of Iraq?

Four years of occupation in Iraq has not only crippled the country but also set the scene for what we can see today of innocent children scavenging in garbage dumps to find something with what they could pass the day.

The appalling condition of many Iraqi children victimized by the U.S. occupation has become too emotive an issue for even American mass media to ignore.

Recently a report by CNN showed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in rags and no longer attending school. Iraqi hospitals are also too strapped with casualties to deal with mental toll on children. According to Iraqi health officials, bomb blasts, gunfire, and killings of family members have plagued Iraq and unfortunately it is the Iraqi children that suffer the most.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has plunged Iraq into a complete quagmire and causing widespread poverty. Iraqi children are most vulnerable, and in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, children can often be seen rummaging through heaps of rubbish, trying to find scraps of food just to survive.

It is difficult to give an exact figure of how much the war and violence has affected the lives of Iraqi children.

The humanitarian organization Save the Children, in a report last year about children in conflict zones, estimated that 818,000 Iraqi children, ranging from 6 to 11 in age, were not in school. That's roughly one in every five Iraqi children in that age group.

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