This two year old child lost a leg when his home was shelled.
Children pay price of US offensive
Al-Jazeera | November 16, 2004
http://infowars.com/articles/iraq/children_payprice.htmAla Barham slumps in his hospital bed and stares blankly into the air in front of him.
Twelve years old and still deeply in shock, he can barely speak.
Ala's family had fled the Iraqi city of Falluja before last Monday's all-out offensive began. He was happily playing with his brother in the garden of their uncle's house in a village outside the city. Then the rocket hit.
"My uncle died. They took us to hospital," he mumbles, speaking in little more than a whisper.
His brother lies face down on the bed next to him, a bandage around his leg, a tube feeding into his stomach.
Their mother sits on another bed, cradling her now fatherless two-year-old nephew.
Across the room, another two-year-old lies on a bed in a nappy, a blanket covering one tiny leg. The other one was blown off by a shell.
Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says not a single civilian has died in the assault to retake Falluja from anti-US forces allegedly led by al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But the charred bodies in the streets of the city and the children in Baghdad's Naaman hospital tell a different story.
"Is this child one of Zarqawi's followers?" asks Nusum Hasan, flatly, holding out her nephew's bandaged right arm.
"Is any of this his fault?"
more...