July 6, 2005 -- (Baghdad) Five-year-old Hanin fought back tears as she saw her peers playing around in jubilation, forced to keep her distance after she had been maimed for life in one of those indiscriminate US raids.

“Sorry, I can’t play with you,” Hanin told her friends bitterly, surrendering herself to the harsh reality of losing one of her two legs in a bloody US airstrike on her neighborhood in Sadr City in Baghdad.

She was like other children whose best of times could be summed up in a hide-and-seek or a fast merry-go-round until her life was turned upside-down two years ago when the US invaded and occupied her country.

At the time, she was sound asleep in her bed when she woke up to the deafening sound of US artillery and air strikes on Baghdad’s Sadr district. Doctors were left with no option but to amputate her badly-hurt leg.

“She suffers from acute depression and has become less interested in talking or playing with other children,” her father told Reuters.

“My heart breaks for her when she says ‘I can’t play with my friends.’ She is our angel daughter,” the mother added.

There are no official estimates of the number of amputees in Iraq after the US-led invasion in March 2003, but doctors put the number at thousands, while experts maintain that the cases outnumber those in countries like Afghanistan, Cambodia and Angola.

According to a Reuters count, some 50,000 people have lost limbs to the ferocious Iraq-Iran war from 1981-88 and during the first US-led war on Iraq after the Kuwait invasion in 1990.

Human Rights Watch, in a report days ahead of the start of the US-led war on Iraq, said cluster munitions dropped in the 1991 Gulf war were to blame for the deaths or amputations of more than 4,000 civilians.

Prosthetic Clinics

The distress has led to the emergence of prosthetic clinics to cope with the great number of amputees.

But despite the distress, there are only eight such clinics in the country. US occupation troops have added insult to injury by damaging some of them in their random raids.

Looters have also their share of the blame as they stole costly-imported raw materials used in producing prostheses.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) has said that Iraqi children are paying the silent cost of the US-led occupation with malnutrition rates exceeding by far those in the world’s poorest and disease-plagued countries.

The United Nations children's relief agency UNICEF has further said that as many as half a million traumatized Iraqi children will need psychological help as a result of the US-led war.