Child Sacrifice: 'Liberation' of a 12-year-old Iraqi

BAGHDAD: This is the story of Ali Ismail Eedan, a 12-year-old boy, who, in his suffering, symbolises a dirty, illegal war being waged against the Iraqi people by the United States.
I am writing this from Baghdad at 11 pm on April 4, 2003. I am in a small hotel near the Tigris with the Iraq Peace Team, and outside I don''t know if the sound I''m hearing is from missiles (incoming American bombs?) or artillery.Anyway the sound is different from the other night. The Americans are very near.
We have no more light since yesterday. They bombed the electrical plant. But before the light from the generator is cut, let me tell you the story of Ali Ismail, whom I met this morning.
Ali is in a bed in the Al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad. A Bush missile hit two houses and the fire burned alive 12 members of his family (mother, father, all his brothers and other relatives).
The sister of his mother is alive as she was not there, and she is now all the time with him. He is fully conscious. He has no arms. And he has a black, burned belly.
Seeing Ali means that for all your life you will not get his image out of your head. He is so handsome with big eyes, and that makes a huge contrast with what remains of him. The rest of him is devastated and, if he survives, he will have to make do with that for all his life.
See, his two arms were burned like two branches of a tree in a fire, and were amputated very high near the shoulders. His belly and stomach are completely black from burns; the sheets cannot touch him, of course, so something like a wooden bridge is put under the sheets to keep them far from him.
Everyday, the doctors remove a part of the skin and replace it with some skin from the legs. But that means a high risk of infection.
The doctors said I should not disturb him. But because his image was disturbing me, I choose to enter anyway to meet him (and it is true that his image disturbs me all the time now). I thought, I want to meet his eyes... will I be able to give him some love and energy? I think that was not the result, but the result is that now my mission is to take his symbolic case out, out, out of Iraq. I wish someone would be able to reach any American soldier in Iraq with his case.
I greeted him Salaam Aleikum and he answered politely. I just looked at him. He keeps looking at his missing arms and that is why I told the doctor to tell him that after the war, we will make sure he has new arms from Italy, artificial ones, very good ones. I don''t know if that helped; his aunty said Inshallah.
The doctor, Muftaz, who is wonderful as are many doctors here, translated and also very kindly tried to distract Ali''s attention by telling him about Italy, the country shaped like a boot. He said yes, he knows about Italy. But I found it so ridiculous to tell a child about artificial arms... How can it help him? What to tell him that could make any difference to his condition?
Ali is asking all the time about his mother and father and family. The doctors tell him that they have broken legs, that they are in another hospital and they cannot come right now. Dr Muftaz says that Ali is very brave, he does not complain very much about his pain but he is always looking at his moving pieces of arms.
At least they have enough analgesics up to now but they don''t yet give the strong ones like morphine because he may need it for the future when the pain becomes more intense. But I heard that in hospitals in other cities there is already a shortage of supplies due to the number of injured, and imagine what happens to the children like Ali there.
When we walked down the corridor of the hospital, we met a man, Jihad Said Obeid, who was coming from Al Suera, a place about 180 km away from Baghdad. He had a relative in that hospital but on March 30, it was hit by pieces of a missile which aimed to destroy the nearby telecommunications centre. He knows one person who died in that.
It is against the Geneva Conventions to bomb a telecommunications centre (as it is not a military target) and to bomb it if there is a chance of hitting a hospital nearby. One more war crime among many here.
All these things are against the Geneva Conventions for the protection of civilians. When we just got out of Ali''s room, in the "garden" of the hospital, we saw an old lady crying under her black dress. Telib, the Iraqi who accompanies us, asked what happened. The lady was crying because a few hours before, a missile hit a place near the historic Mustansirya University and killed her daughter, who was a bride.
(The author is an Italian peace activist in Baghdad with the international Iraq Peace Team)