Watching Children Starve to Death

In a dingy pediatric ward at Baghdad's Qadissiya Hospital, Fadhia, 19, stands vigil over a crib where her five-month-old daughter lies dying of malnutrition. She has been here before: a month earlier she watched as her three-year-old son succumbed to starvation and diarrhea. Now she watches as her little daughter, her face all shriveled and her body bony, grows smaller every day. The hospital is crammed with such children. But it has no food to save them, and scant medicine.

Even sheets and diapers are lacking, so the famished babies lie naked on plastic mattresses. Each day the hospital admits another 10 cases of marasmus -- an advanced state of malnutrition that causes the child's face and body to become as shriveled and haggard as those of a wizened old man. Other children have grotesquely swollen bellies -- a symptom of the starvation syndrome known as kwashiorkor. Before the war, says the hospital's director, there was barely one such case a year.

While America has celebrated a swift, efficient victory in the Persian Gulf, a tour of hospitals inside Iraq tells the story of a different war. This one is still being fought, against epidemic disease and starvation, the conflict's sorry legacies. Its principal victims are children. The tour, sponsored by the Arab-American Medical Association for doctors of Iraqi extraction, afforded unprecedented access to the country's ravaged medical system and desperate doctors and patients. But even on the street, the hunger and suffering were palpable. "I was shocked by the look on people's faces," Cleveland physician Nadia al-Kaisi told TIME, the only U.S. publication represented on the tour. "They are all emotionless, desperate faces without smiles."

Hospital administrators and doctors, who give interviews in rooms invariably decorated with a portrait of Saddam Hussein smiling benevolently, are often reluctant to admit the extent of the health disaster they are witnessing. But signs of distress are everywhere. Many hospitals were damaged by allied bombing, including three in Baghdad and two in Basra. Completely destroyed was the only hospital in the country that performed kidney transplants and advanced heart surgery. In other cases, physical damage to medical facilities was caused by the civilian uprisings that followed the war.

But most widespread problems are traceable to the allied devastation of power plants and to the continuing trade embargo. Without electricity, hospitals cannot operate even such basic equipment as incubators or refrigerators needed to store blood and medicine, much less the more sophisticated machinery of operating rooms and intensive-care units. In the northern city of Arbil, all premature infants are dying: there are no working incubators. In the southern city of Karbala, a hospital without refrigeration relies on a makeshift method to acquire blood for transfusions: the staff sends a young man running out of the hospital to fetch a person with the proper blood type, who will give blood as the operation progresses.