By Sandro Contenta
Toronto Star Middle East Bureau

SADDAM CITY, Iraq -- Death is doing the rounds at Ibn Al-Baladi hospital.

It strikes while Dr. Uldram Ahmed is on duty, standing at the bedside of a
malnourished baby, plucking at the infant's distended belly to show the loss
of skin elasticity.

His examination is jarringly interrupted by an aide who runs into the room
shouting and pointing to the corridor, ``She's dead. The child is dead!''

It's 2:56 p.m.

Ahmed dashes out and sees a woman wrapped in a black chador covering a
bundle in her arms.

He lifts the veil and finds a toddler in a red dress, nestled as though
sleeping in her mother's arms. Her name as Yousser Wadi. She is one year
old.

``She fell sick 10 days ago,'' says her mother, who is from a village a
three-hour drive from Baghdad. She arrived at the hospital just five minutes
before the girl died.

Such chilling dramas are replayed five or six times a day in Ahmed's 260-bed
children's hospital in this poor and filthy suburb of Baghdad.

Aug. 2 is the 10th anniversary of Saddam Hussein's stunning invasion of
Kuwait. Economic and military sanctions were imposed by the United Nations
Security Council four days later and have remained in place ever since.
Today, and in future editions, The Star will examine various aspects of the
Iraqi problem.

The wide-ranging economic and trade sanctions in essence prohibit all trade
with Iraq except for medical equipment and food for humanitarian purposes.
They also bar airlines from flying to and from Iraq and control how much
crude Iraq can sell under the ``oil-for- food'' program. The U.N. sanctions,
designed to punish or topple Saddam, have instead left ordinary Iraqis
languishing in Third World squalor while the ruling elite remains entrenched
and well-heeled.

An oil-rich country whose hospitals and schools were once the envy of the
Middle East, Iraq has been brought to its knees.

Its professional and technical class has vanished, its members reduced to
doing odd jobs or emigrating. A civil servant gets about 5,000 dinars a
month, or $2.50 (U.S.). A teacher gets even less.

Youth drop out of miserably equipped schools, where funding has dropped from
$230 million (U.S.) in the mid-1980s to just $23 million today. They're a
lost generation, stunted by malnutrition and growing up on little more than
hate for the United States.

``It has transcended the bounds of tragedy. It's a concrete genocide,'' says
Ryadh Al Qaysi, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, referring to the sanctions
policy.

Western nations reject that assertion, but officials quietly concede the
sanctions policy has not worked. And that poses a troubling conundrum for a
world community that is trying to find ways to punish bad guys.

In Iraq, in large part because the tyrannical Saddam has no compunction
about letting his people bear the brunt of the punishment, the efforts have
come at a very high cost.

A UNICEF report last year, conducted with the help of the Iraqi government,
estimated 500,000 children under the age of 5 died between 1991 and 1999.

Mortality for children under 5, the report found, rose from 56 deaths per
1,000 live births between 1984 and 1989, to 131 per 1,000 between 1994 and
1999.

``Iraq has gone from being on a par with countries like Greece to being on a
par with countries like Haiti,'' UNICEF official Tim Sutton says of the
infant mortality rate.

Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF's chief representative in Iraq, calls the
sanctions ``frightfully unsmart.''

``Sanctions are a legitimate instrument. But at the same time, we have
enough experience worldwide to show that sanctions, when imposed, tend to
hurt vulnerable groups in a country rather than the elite they're supposed
to target,'' she says.

If the embargo's humanitarian results have been tragic, its political
results are mixed.

Saddam is in no shape to threaten Iraq's neighbours, but he's still in
power. Much of his nuclear weapons program has been dismantled. But further
destruction of his arsenal ended in 1998, when U.N. monitors were expelled
by Baghdad and the U.S. and Britain began a low-level bombing campaign that
has continued for 18 months.

Now it's a stalemate: Iraq won't let monitors back in, saying its nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons have all been destroyed, and the U.N. won't
lift sanctions until it does.

In December, 1996, the U.N. implemented the oil-for-food program, which
allows Iraq to sell oil and buy humanitarian goods. The U.N.-supervised
program - which has approved $10.4 billion (U.S.) worth of goods so far -
has slowed, but not stopped, the sharp decline in health and living
standards, Rao Singh says.

U.S. officials say Saddam is using money to build grand palaces and pay off
military officials rather than feed his people. They also charge Iraq is
selling medicine on the black market in nearby countries.

But U.N. officials note the oil-for-food program has numerous ``observation
mechanisms'' that keep track of how the program's goods, including food and
medicines, are used.

``Not one of those observation mechanisms has reported any major problem in
humanitarian supplies being diverted, switched, or in any way misused,''
says George Somerwill, spokesperson for the U.N.'s humanitarian relief
program in Iraq.

Dr. Hussein Zakar, head of the World Health Organization in Iraq, says the
U.N. is slow to approve contracts for medicine, which contributes to
shortages. And distribution within Iraq is hampered by broken-down trucks
and the lack of money to pay workers.

A sanitation crisis is also endangering lives. Crumbling water and sewage
treatment networks pump out polluted drinking water while the U.N. withholds
contracts for spare parts, concerned they might be used for military
purposes.

Each day, some 300 tonnes of solid, untreated raw sewage is discharged
directly into rivers because treatment plants can't handle the load. Only 10
per cent of garbage trucks work, so only one-third of the garbage is
collected. The rest is left to rot in fields or on the streets.

And only one-quarter of Iraqis in the country's central and southern regions
are served by piped sewage systems.

Taken together, these factors have turned Iraqi communities into breeding
grounds for the increased cases of cholera, typhoid and gastroenteritis that
are making short work of malnourished children. Nowhere is this more visible
than in Hai Al Tarek.

Ali Hussein, the 10-week old baby who died, lived in Hai Al Tarek, perhaps
the worst slum on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Dr. Ahmed is on the front lines of the fight to save children. He describes
the human cost in cold, clinical language.

``It starts with marasmus - progressive loss of weight due to malnutrition -
and then they're hit with blood diarrhea,'' he says.

``Look how thin her hair is,'' he says, plucking at strands on Yousser's
head. ``It is a sign of the disease: she had loss of weight due to
malnutrition, blood diarrhea, vomiting, and then death.'' Yousser's mother
covers her child in her veil and walks away.

Then comes a despairing voice from a nearby room: ``Another one has died.''

It is 3:03 p.m., just seven minutes after death made its first visit.

Yousser's mother can still be seen walking away, and Ahmed is already
heading into the examination room for another example of the hospital's
daily, deadly routine.

On a long green table lies 10-week-old Ali Hussein, an impossibly tiny baby
of skin and bones who has just vomited his last breath of blood on a blanket
beneath him.

Dr. Ghassam Rasheed Al Baya, a young man with a bushy moustache, searches
for life with a stethoscope on the baby's chest. Ali's 18-year-old mother is
bent over her son, frozen in shock.

Ali's shirt is pulled up under his chin. His skin is ashen and shrivelled,
his belly bloated, and his ribs protrude to meet at a hollow in the middle
of his chest.

His tiny fingers are half-closed like claws, as though to the very end he
tried to hang on to life.

Ali's mother, who brought the baby to the hospital four hours earlier, comes
out of her daze, wraps the tiny body in the stained blanket and hurries out..

``It is the third baby I see die today. I am very depressed,'' Baya says.
``This embargo is a crime. These babies are not soldiers. Why must they
die?''

He blames the embargo for the lack of medication necessary to treat the
large numbers of malnourished children who fall victim to chronic diarrhea,
especially during the scorching summer months.

Ahmed enters a ward where babies fill several beds.

Toddler Rinda Satar is gasping for breath as her mother Jassima Abed chases
flies from the child's face. ``The water we drink is dirty,'' says Abed, 32..

``It is fatal,'' Ahmed says, once out of the room. ``I think she will die
today; not more than six to eight hours.''

Rinda is discharged overnight, to die at home.

The community started taking shape in the late 1980s, settled by those who
could not afford to live in Saddam City, itself a poverty-stricken suburb of
Baghdad.

>From the garbage-strewn streets of Saddam City, a dirt bridge across a
water-filled canal leads to Hai Al Tarek. The canal was originally built to
divert flood waters. Today, it's the main dump for Al Tarek's untreated
sewage.

More than 30,000 people, many of them squatters, live in one-room row houses
of mud bricks and cement blocks. There's no sewage system, and most don't
have running water. Pipes from homes take urine and other liquid waste to
gutters dug out in the middle of the dirt roads, where barefoot children
play.

Flies, mosquitoes and a stench that no one seems to notice any more hangs
thick in the hot air.

``The water smells, and my children are always sick,'' says Hashemia Abdul
Hassan, 30, watching children play knee-deep in a gray pool of stagnant
water.

Saad Benham Abdullah, general director for the Baghdad Water Supply
Authority, says his department doesn't have money to repair Baghdad's water
and sewage networks, let alone extend them to places like Hai Al Tarek.

A small pumping station makes some 3,000 cubic metres of water per day
available for Hai Al Tarek - four times less than needed for a population of
its size, he says.

Hai Al Tarek residents often get water by illegally plugging small pumps
directly into main water lines, Abdullah says. It causes ``negative
pressure'' that sucks untreated sewage into the water line.

``There are 20 or 30 places like Al Tarek around Baghdad,'' says Abdullah.