http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=68949United States detain nearly 800 juveniles in Iraq Monday, August 20, 2007
BAGHDAD: US troops are holding nearly 800 children and teenagers on a Baghdad base, boys who are largely illiterate and picked up for allegedly planting bombs and now the focus of a multi-million-dollar education project.
Dressed in orange jumpsuits reminiscent of the uniforms of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, the youngsters aged 10 to 17 attend a US-run school seven days a week, eight hours a day, in order to mend their ways.
The number of overall security detainees in Iraq has skyrocketed in the six months since General David Petraeus flooded the nation with thousands more soldiers, to lift the total to 165,000 American troops, designed to quell the sectarian conflict and insurgency.
Some 16,000 detainees were in custody before this “surge” in troop numbers. Today there are 24,000 security detainees according to the US military. This year so far only 2,251 detainees have been convicted.
Soldiers are now picking up more than 100 youngsters a month, up from an average of 25 a month last year. On Feb 1, there were 272 youth detainees. This week there were 787, said Captain John Flemming.
US commanders say most of them — which include some as young as 10 years — are caught making and planting roadside bombs, or acting as lookouts for bombers and snipers. Others carry guns. Some are fighters.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=46194Bombs haunt Iraqi children Friday, March 09, 2007
BAGHDAD: Iraqi children are haunted by dreams of bad guys wielding knives or kidnapping relatives. For some, like 13-year-old Zaman, the nightmares become reality. She was abducted, beaten and threatened with rape.
“Zaman suffers from shaking, nervousness, a stutter and sleep disorder,” said Haider Abdul-Muhsin, a psychiatrist at Baghdad’s Ibn Rushd hospital who treats children suffering the consequences of war, four years after the US invasion.
Abdul-Muhsin said Zaman was abducted in Baghdad last month on her way home from school. Zaman was not at the hospital when Reuters visited, but Abdul-Muhsin said few children he had treated recently had affected him as much.
“An elderly woman asked her to help her carry some plastic bags across the road to find a taxi. While she was taking her bags back from Zaman, she grabbed her and forced her into the taxi. She anesthetized Zaman and tied her up,” he said.
The girl was held in a room with 15 other girls for seven hours before being released by police who raided the house.
“They beat her, they told her that they would send her to insurgents as a forced ’bride’,” Abdul-Muhsin said.
Four years of war and now sectarian chaos that threatens to tear Iraq apart has had an enormous impact on children.
Car bombs explode every day in Baghdad. Mortar bombs rain down on some neighbourhoods. Death squads roam the streets and kidnappings are rampant. Kicking a soccer ball around on the streets is like dicing with death.
There are no figures on the number of children killed in violence since US forces invaded in March 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein—although the United Nations says 34,500 civilians were killed in violence last year in Iraq alone.
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