Category — Case Profiles

The following text is taken from a letter written about Mustafa’s case by an Iraqi colleague in Jordan:

On the 3rd September 2006, Mustafa (2 and ½ years old then) was with his father “Ahmed” in the car heading home after doing some shopping for the house. They parked the car just outside their house and stood there for a couple of minutes chatting with a couple of Ahmed’s neighbors and friends. Mustafa was standing just beside his father – as all children of his age do. It was sunset time in Saidiya district in South Western Baghdad.

A car came to park slowly in front of the three friends, the window was lowered slowly, and before they knew it, a machine gun nozzle appeared and started shooting at the group. Ahmed and Mustafa were hit at once; the three others ran inside the house to escape the bullets. Two of the men from the car got down and ran inside after the group and finished them off in the kitchen in front of their families and kids; before running away, the attackers shot Ahmed – who was unconscious – again to make sure he was dead.

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Dani is from the Karrada district in Baghdad. Due to the lack of basic preventative care in Baghdad, he suffers from abnormal swelling in his eyes that has threatened his eyesight on more than one occasion. His family tried to travel together to Amman, but his older brother and father were turned back at the border, leaving him alone with his mother in Jordan, with little means of support, since his father and brother are not able to provide sufficient remittances from their irregular work in Iraq.

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Haifa’a was shot in the face by members of a militia in Baghdad as a result of her failure to abide by the new restrictions they had placed on women’s behavior in her neighborhood. The weapon used fired a special kind of corrosive cartridge - only manufactured in the United States and Israel - that destroyed Haifa’a’s eye and much of the bone surrounding it.

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Hussein is a four-year-old boy, diagnosed with Hirschsprung’s Disease (HD), a serious, congenital illness which causes chronic constipation and severe discomfort, and can slow physical development. Children with HD are born without some or all of the nerves in the large intestine that are necessary for elimination. Left untreated, HD can cause infection, a ruptured colon, and death.

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