Ahmed Abdullah Sallal was 10 years old when his cousin put a knife in his hand and ordered him to kill a man.
Now he is 12 and living on the streets of Baghdad, afraid to return to his mother in southern Iraq in case the murdered man’s family finds him and delivers its own form of justice.
Ahmed is just one of thousands of homeless children who are the most vulnerable people in an increasingly dangerous city after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime last month.
”It’s very dangerous to live on the streets. There are a lot of looters and they steal from us and attack us,” Ahmed said as he played with a toy gun, a gift from a foreigner.
”In the orphanage they used to beat us and here they shoot at us, but I prefer to live on the street.”
Ahmed and around 15 of his homeless young friends spend most days in the downtown Baghdad traffic circle where Saddam’s statue was famously torn down by US forces a month ago.
They beg for money from foreign journalists and US tank crews at the nearby Palestine Hotel until the hotel staff shoo them away. To cool off in the blistering heat they swim in the foetid water of a polluted fountain.
At night they eat scraps of food left over from the meals of the hotel staff and curl up to sleep on flattened cardboard boxes in a garden beside the busy road.
Chain-smoking, Ahmed admits that he is usually high from sniffing paint-thinner, which he buys for 1 000 dinars (about $3) a bottle.
”I know it’s unhealthy but I can’t give it up. It helps me forget my family and lets me sleep at night,” he said.
All the children at the traffic circle, where Saddam’s statue is being replaced with a mother and child symbolising Iraq’s rebirth, say they were abused in government orphanages.
Renap Abid Lazim is obviously pregnant, but the 15-year-old would not talk about her condition. She said she was still a virgin. Both her parents died in an Iranian air raid during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, she said.
”I feel safe here in the garden even though we have no one to protect us and people have a lot of guns and attack us for no reason,” she said, adding that no international aid workers had offered any help.
Asked why she lived on the street, she showed the scars of physical abuse.
There is a gash across her left palm, where she said the orphanage workers slashed her with garden clippers because she was ”leading protests” over food shortages.
Down her cheek are three long cuts, inflicted with a razor blade by ”people who wanted to kidnap me”.
She described regular beatings by orphanage staff who would strike her feet and back with a length of hose. Renap said she would like to get a job but she had never been to school and could not read or write.
”I could clean but I can’t cook,” she said.
”I am waiting for the mercy of God.”
United Nation’s Children’s Fund Executive Director Carol Bellamy earlier this month warned Iraq’s new administrators that children will die unless their welfare is made an urgent priority.
”We’re calling on both Iraqis and the parties shaping Iraqi society to make the protection of children job number one,” she said in a statement.
”Iraq’s future depends on the health and well-being of its children. At the moment we are failing them. They should be our first priority… and frankly I’m not seeing nearly enough action for children.” – Sapa-AFP