KC Star Blog: "It's Just One More Photo Of One More Dying Person In Sadr City"

Hissyspit

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Tue Apr-29-08 06:30 PM
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KC Star Blog: "It's Just One More Photo Of One More Dying Person In Sadr City"

Edited on Tue Apr-29-08 07:05 PM by Hissyspit

http://primebuzz.kcstar.com/?q=node/11369

About a photo, about Iraq

It's just one more photo of one more dying person in Sadr City.

Sadr City - the sterotype of a slum that's been a danger to US troops for years. The stronghold of Iraqi Muqtada al Sadr, so much in the news these days.

Sadr City - a jumble of dust colored, three-story buildings housing anywhere from one million to three million people, many desperately poor.

Goats forage from the piles of garbage that fill the medians and line the streets.

Heartbreaking: Two-year-old Ali Hussein is pulled from the rubble of his family's home in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq on Tuesday, April 29, 2008. The child, who later died at the hospital, was in one of four homes destroyed by U.S. missiles. More than two dozen people were killed when Shiite militants ambushed a U.S. patrol in Baghdad's embattled Sadr City district, bringing the death toll in area on Tuesday to more than 30, a U.S. military spokesman and Iraqi officials said. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

In the past, just after statues of Saddam fell and Americans first rolled through, I watched the children of this slum play army, carrying real weapons, squeezing off live rounds, but clearly involved in fights of fancy.

But these aren't good times. The play of children a little older than Ali Hussein is limited to the imagination, and an imagination that is increasingly filled with violent thoughts.

As Khaldoon Waleed, a Baghdad child psychologist, said to a colleague several years ago, a generation of children is growing up here with post-traumatic stress disorder, commonly associated with soldiers. It can cause everything from nightmares to an inability to connect with people.

"The children of Iraq have lost all sense of humanity," he said. "Killing and being killed has become daily routine to them."

But to children as little as Ali, two years old, the world often is limited to immediate surroundings. The walls of their homes, the skirts of their mothers, don't seem confining, as much as comfortable.

So, when he died, he died in the place he must have felt the most safe, the place his parents must have known he was safe. Instead, it was one of four homes in the area "destroyed by U.S. missiles." In the photo, you can sense the panic in the pose of his father, his chalk covered baby extended above him after he's been pulled from the rubble.

- snip -

This isn't the first photo of such collateral damage I've seen. I carry one with me, five babies in the bed of a pickup truck. I try to forget the actual scenes of death.

There�s no way to know the actual number of children who�ve been killed by this fighting _ by Americans, by Iraqi insurgents, by Al Qaida terrorists, by private security forces. And if there�s no way to know how many of the estimated 100,000 to 700,000 civilian dead were children, there�s no hope of knowing how many have died in Sadr City.

So I don't have any overwhelming statement about Iraq to make based on this moment. I don't really have any statement to make, at all. Beyond this: I can't stop myself from crying for Ali, and the children of Iraq.

Submitted by Matt Schofield on April 29, 2008 - 3:20pm.
International Buzz | Matt Schofield |

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