WHERE HAVE ALL THE IRAQI CHILDREN GONE?

A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent.

It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.

According to a UN Children's Fund report released this month, "at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases."

Omar Khalif is vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of the missing and trafficked. He told reporters in January that on average at least two Iraqi children are sold by their parents every week. In addition, another four are reported missing every week.

CHILDHOOD IS DYING IN IRAQ

Inter Press Service

By Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali*BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) -

Iraq's children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.

The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.

But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.

Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.

Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq's unstable environment.

"The numbers are alarming," Khalif said. "There is an increase of 20 percent in the reported cases of missing children over a year."

According to the UN, 17 percent of Iraqi children are permanently out of primary school, and an estimated 220,000 more are missing school because they and their families have been displaced.

That adds up to 760,000 children out of primary school in 2006.

These are in-country figures, and do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and youth whose education is interrupted or ended because their families have fled to other countries.

UNHCR estimates that at least 2.25 million Iraqis have fled their country.

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