Those from wealthier families have marble markers with their names in elaborate green or red writing, or faded photographs of them smiling or playing.
The children of the poor are simply brought to the gates and left with Khadim Mosul, the caretaker, who has watched over al-Baratha, a children’s cemetery in northern Baghdad, for 23 years. Their graves are mounds of dirt.
“Some parents arrive crying. Others simply give me the body and say a prayer,” he said. “Then I bury them and they never see their child again.”
Khadim buries, on average, 25 children a day. By early afternoon yesterday he had buried seven. The eighth was brought to the gates: a two-day-old boy born prematurely. The hospital lacked the means to keep him alive. The baby’s father could not afford the 50,000 dinar £15 burial fee, so he handed the corpse to Khadim, said a tearful prayer from the Koran, and left.
Error processing SSI file“He was too sad to stay and see his baby buried,” Khadim said as he washed the infant, wrapped him in a white muslin shroud and laid the tiny bundle in the earth. Bricks were piled over his body and earth poured on top. The only witness was the gravedigger and a small boy who loiters in the cemetery, begging.
What makes these deaths so tragic, Khadim said, is that many parents know that their children would have lived were Iraq not crippled by economic sanctions.
He has overseen the burial of more children than he can count, but in the dozen years since the United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, there has been a massive increase. Most have died from malnutrition, water-borne illnesses or in the early days of infancy because their mothers’ pre-natal conditions were so poor. Others died from diseases that would be treatable in countries with sufficient medical care, or from illnesses such as tetanus or hepatitis that could be prevented through vaccination.
Figures issued by Unicef yesterday suggest that one in eight Iraqi children dies before the age of five, one of the worst rates in the world. A third are malnourished, a quarter are born underweight and a quarter lack access to safe water.
“Before sanctions I did not have much work,” Khadim said. “We only put two or three a day into the ground. Now, we’re overworked.”
The infant mortality rate has declined since 1999 — to 133 deaths per 1,000 children — but it is still 2½ times what it was in 1989 and there is a fear that the country will simply crumble in another war. A report by a group of international doctors and psychologists who visited Iraq last month says that Iraqi children are far more vulnerable now than they were in 1991, or than were children in the Afghan conflict, because the country’s infrastructure is so depleted.
Food stores are a problem. Nearly eight million children are dependent on state rations, which will cease once hostilities begin, and the UN estimates that the country has food stores for only a month.
The hospitals would be unable to handle a sudden flood of casualities, as most have supplies for only three to four weeks. An estimated 200,000 people could be injured in the case of a ground invasion, and aerial bombardment would increase the anxiety and depression already prevalent among many Iraqi children.
Al-Baratha, which is the size of two football pitches, is already full. Many of the graves are overgrown with weeds, but a notable exception is that of Shehad, a three-year-old girl who died of leukemia in 1999. Her father, Morfuq Abdel Ali, a builder, comes every afternoon to wipe the dust and grime from the headstone, methodically shining the marble. Then he sits by his daughter’s grave staring blankly, face sunken with sorrow.
“She was our only child,” he said. “She had a bruise on her arm. Four days later she was dead.”
Even if he had known where to find black-market chemotherapy treatment, which costs about £1,800, he could never have raised the money.
Khadim keeps detailed records of all the dead children buried in al-Baratha. Like most Iraqis, he knows another war is coming.
He has not heard the statistics in the doctors’ report, which concludes: “Should war occur, casualties among (Iraqi) children will be in the thousands, probably tens of thousands, possibly hundreds”, but he senses disaster.
Holding the freshly painted headstone of an 11-month-old girl, Maryam Saleh Abid, who died on Sunday morning, he said he was certain that he would be burying many more children in the days to come.