Sanctions have killed millions of Iraqi children

NEW YORK, January 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – According to a confidential U.N. report, nearly 500,000 Iraqis are prone to suffer serious injuries during the first phase of an attack, British media reported Tuesday, January 8.

The BBC’s online news service said that the number “includes up to 100,000 wounded in combat, and another 400,000 hurt in the devastation expected during any U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”

The BBC said that the report, which was posted on a website of a Cambridge University group, had its authenticity confirmed by the U.N. and that their correspondent said that the U.N. “has been somewhat embarrassed by the revelation of the details of its contingency planning, given that the exercise could be interpreted as an assumption that military action against Iraq is almost inevitable.”

The report’s facts and figures were based in estimates by the World Health Organization which portrays the population of Iraq as just over 26 million people, said the BBC.

It added that the Iraqi population is “extremely dependent” on the government as well as aid agencies for basic needs and services such as water, electricity supplies and transportation.

“Unlike the situation prior to military intervention in Iraq in 1991, the reports says that in the present day many Iraqi people have exhausted their reserves of cash and material assets.

“The normal safety nets have disappeared and this relatively sophisticated and urbanized population could struggle to cope in the face of a major military attack,” said the BBC.

On  December 29, In a letter sent to U.N. Sanctions Committee Man’m Al Qadi, Iraq's interim charge d’affaires in the U.N. said that a total of 1,614,303 people had died due to the stringent U.N. sanctions on the country since 1990.

Al-Qadi said that the colossal human losses include 667,773 children under the age of five, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.

In sharp contrast, the report said there were only 258 recorded deaths of children under five in 1989, one year before the sanctions were imposed on Iraq, the Chinese Xinhua news agency reported. 

The letter slammed the “arbitrary” practices of the U.N. committee by suspending Iraq's contracts signed with other countries to import food, medicine and other essentials within the framework of the U.N. oil-for-food program since 1996. 

Earlier in July, an official Iraqi statement issued by the Ministry of Education confirmed that the second Gulf War in 1991 against Iraq and the siege imposed on the Iraqi people throughout the past 10 years have caused the death of more than 1 million Iraqi children and infected more than another million with dangerous diseases.

The siege has also caused the spread of illiteracy among Iraqi children.

It also confirmed that the American siege imposed on Iraq increased the mortality rates of children under 5 years old as a result of malnutrition.

The report showed that the Iraqi environment was also influenced since the beginning of the second Gulf War.