The car stopped at the makeshift checkpoint that cut across the
muddy backstreet in western Baghdad. A sentry appeared. "Are you
Sunni or Shia?" he barked, waving his Kalashnikov at the driver.
"Are you with Zarqawi or the Mahdi army?"
"The Mahdi army," the driver said. "Wrong answer," shouted the
sentry, almost gleefully. "Get him!"
The high metal gate of a nearby house was flung open and four
gun-toting males rushed out. They dragged the driver from his
vehicle and held a knife to his neck. Quickly and efficiently, the
blade was run from ear to ear. "Now you're dead," said a triumphant
voice, and their captive crumpled to the ground.
Then a moment of stillness before the sound of a woman's voice.
"Come inside boys! Your dinner is ready!" The gunmen groaned; the
hapless driver picked himself up and trundled his yellow plastic
car into the front yard; the toy guns and knives were tossed by the
back door. Their murderous game of make-believe would have to
resume in the morning.
Abdul-Muhammad and his five younger brothers, aged between six
and 12, should have been at school. But their mother, Sayeeda, like
thousands of parents in Iraq's perilous capital city, now keeps her
boys at home. Three weeks ago, armed men had intercepted their
teacher's car at the school gates, then hauled him out and slit his
throat. Just like in their game.
"That day they came home and they were changed because of the
things they'd seen," said Sayeeda. "The youngest two have been
wetting their beds and having nightmares, while Abdul-Muhammad has
started bullying and ordering everyone to play his fighting games.
I know things are not normal with them. My fear is one day they
will get hold of real guns. But in these times, where is the
help?"
The boys live with their widowed mother and uncle in a modest
family house in al-Amil, a once peaceful, religiously mixed suburb
in western Baghdad that is yielding to the gunmen, street by
street. Similar tales of growing up in the war zone are heard
across the country.
Parents, teachers and doctors contacted over the past three
months cite a litany of distress signals sent out by young people
in their care from nightmares and bedwetting to withdrawal,
muteness, panic attacks and violence towards other children,
sometimes even to their own parents.
Amid the statistical haze that enshrouds civilian casualties, no
one is sure how many children have been killed or maimed in Iraq.
But psychologists and aid organizations warn that while the
physical scars of the conflict are all too visible in hospitals and
mortuaries and on television screens the mental and emotional
turmoil experienced by Iraq's young is going largely unmonitored
and untreated.
In a rare study published last week, the Association of Iraqi
Psychologists (API) said the violence had affected millions of
children, raising serious concerns for future generations. It urged
the international community to help establish child psychology
units and mental health programs. "Children in Iraq are seriously
suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, especially with
the fear of kidnapping and explosions," the API's Marwan Abdullah
told IRIN, the UN-funded news agency. "In some cases, they're found
to be suffering extreme stress," he said.
Sherif Karachatani, a psychology professor at the University of
Sulaymaniya, said: "Every day another innocent child is orphaned or
sees terrible things children should never see. Who is taking care
of the potentially enormous damage being done to a generation of
children?"
There are well-founded fears, he said, that the "relentless
bloodshed and the lack of professional help will see Iraq's
children growing up either deeply scarred or so habituated to
violence that they keep the pattern going as they enter
adulthood".
Because of the dire security, organizations such as UNICEF (the
United Nations Children's Fund), have only a skeleton presence in
Iraq. Save the Children is closing its operations next month after
15 years in the country. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has been
forced to suspend a program for children suffering from war trauma
owing to lack of funding.
The country's overstretched hospitals cannot cope with
psychological trauma and many of the best doctors have either fled
the country or been killed. The problems are compounded by the
stigma that psychological and psychiatric care carries. "They don't
bring their children in for treatment, fearing they will be labeled
as mad," Karachatani said.
The field is left to small local and foreign NGOs and to
hard-pressed Iraqi psychologists, who are not immune to bloodshed.
In December, Harith Hassan, one of Iraq's most prominent child
psychologists, was shot dead as he drove to work. A regular
commentator in the Iraqi media known for his ruthlessly honest
comments about the Iraqi mindset, Hassan had worked with victims of
trauma. And he had been determined to wean Iraqi youth from their
obsession with the gun.
"It's all some of them think about and know," he had told the
Guardian. "The dangers are they will internalise the violence and
then reproduce it later."
As with Abdul-Muhammad and his brothers, stories and images of
beheadings and sectarian atrocities were working their way into
play, he said, "bringing nightmares to life". But that need not be
harmful. "Getting it out in their play is probably quite healthy,"
said Anne Jefferies, humanitarian advocacy adviser with Save the
Children. The key thing was to provide a safe environment in which
children could play, supervised by adults.
Yet in Baghdad's al-Amil neighborhood that is not easy. Haunted
by the specter of violence, parents have stopped taking their
children to local play areas. The neighborhood's two amusement
arcades are shuttered and there are few safe places to play sports.
School attendance is down by as much as 60 percent.
Lynne Jones, a child psychiatrist with the International Medical
Corps who studied children under war in Bosnia, said: "Children are
often incredibly resilient. In a number of studies, trauma in
children in war zones has tailed off quite rapidly once the
violence dies down."
Their continued wellbeing depends on the kind of environment in
which they live after that, and the values of their families or
parents, she said.
Shortly before his murder, Hassan told of his fears for Iraq's
current young generation. "Do not make the mistake of blaming the
occupation and the recent war for all of this," he said. "For more
than three decades, young Iraqis have been forced to learn how to
kill. We must now learn instead about dialogue and compromise.
Otherwise, we will continue to produce psychopathic personalities
for whom violence is simply a means of negotiating daily life."
(China Daily via The Guardian February 9,
2007)
