Lee Gordon, a former New Journal reporter, is a freelance journalist who has been reporting on the war in Iraq. He is trying to raise money to assist a hospital in Basra for children who have lost limbs in the war.

On his return to Iraq Lee Gordon discovered a village where the people have all but given up hope of aid to help children maimed by allied bombs

AS the old man lifted the girl from the rubble he could feel her life ebbing away. Her foot dangled by a thread of torn flesh and bone, her eyes fluttered through pale, dusty lids and she hung limply in his arms. He stumbled through the smoking ruins of the village, put her down to wait for a medic and stood back to survey what was left of Misan. The row of houses he had pulled the girl from had been flattened, the surrounding homes partially collapsed and a handful of survivors were beginning to emerge, wiping smoke from their eyes or nursing bloody wounds.
A burning school bus began to pop and crackle and somewhere a car alarm started, adding to the chorus of screams. The coalition bombing had taken Misan by surprise. The farming village, 12 miles outside Basra, had been thought to be a safe haven from the coalition invasion but it found itself in the path of British forces advancing on the city and was bombed within a week of war breaking out. Dozens were killed and scores more wounded.
Misan has barely changed in the past two years – as if the reconstruction of Iraq has passed it by. The shattered houses are like a stone tableau to the dead pulled from beneath them: collapsed roofs, pockmarked walls and doorways that open onto a landscape of rubble. Ironically the British government Department for International Development (DfID), responsible for British aid to southern Iraq, has its headquarters less than 30 minutes drive away in central Basra but has not turned its attention to Misan.

A horribly wounded Ibtihaj, aged 8, is pulled from the rubble of her house by her uncle Abu Shakir The boy who stepped on a landmine near the Saudi Arabian border

As I pulled up in a four-wheel drive, children, some barefoot, darted between the muddy paths and ruins. I was struck by the number who were limping and hobbling. Many, it turns out, were playing in the street when the US-led coalition’s bomb hit and were maimed by shrapnel. An old man sidled up to me, pulling a weathered photograph from his wallet. It showed an old man carrying a horribly injured child from the aftermath of an explosion. He pointed to a girl standing nearby and explained the photograph was of him rescuing her from the rubble we were standing in. I recognised her immediately: a dramatic picture of her being rescued had appeared in newspapers across the world, briefly becoming an iconic symbol of the war.
Just eight-years-old and a deaf-mute since childhood, Ibtihal had been pulled to safety while her parents and five brothers died under the rubble we were standing on. Unable to cry for help, Ibtihal was rescued by Abu Shakir, a distant cousin, who spotted the hem of her dress.
Her left leg was amputated below the knee and the little orphan has been cared for by an uncle, a destitute looking man who, like most in Misan, lost everything in the war. As a result of lasting shell-shock and the childhood condition that left her a deaf and dumb – the consequence of medical shortages during sanctions on Iraq – Ibtihal appears to bear her tragedy with a wistful detachment.
Smiling with an empty look in her eyes she sat by Abu Shakir as he recalled the day in March 2003 when Misan changed forever. “I ran to their home when I saw what had happened and started digging,” he said. “I pulled her brother from the stones but I could see he was dead and then I saw her dress. When I got her out she was almost dead. Her eyes were flickering and I could feel her dying but I ran with her in my arms and somehow thanks to God she lived.”
As political changes gather pace in Iraq it is the war victims like Ibtihal who have been abandoned to the ruins of Misan. Her false leg is so old the toes have rotted away and it is several sizes too small leaving her with a pronounced limp. Doctors at the prosthetics centre in Basra – the only one in southern Iraq – would like to fit her with a better leg but can’t because they have no more limbs for children.
The prosthetics centre in Basra, at the back of the main hospital, is out of sight in every sense. Run by three doctors and a handful of clinicians, it relies on international donations to keep going.
Clinic director Dr Kamal Yaqoub said: “There is enough demand to keep the clinic working 24 hours-a-day but enough money for only four or five hours.”
He explained there are only four technicians responsible for making, adjusting and fitting limbs – a quarter of the number needed. Three fled the city to be with their families elsewhere in Iraq but the Basra clinic doesn’t have enough money to build accommodation so that replacement technicians can relocate to the city, to pay wages or even overtime to cope with the number of patients. He said: “Every day we have to send children home with nothing. We are treating half as many patients as we used to before the war.”
His words are depressingly familiar, echoing those of Doctor Imad Khudair Hadi, director of the national prosthesis centre in Baghdad. Last year he said: “About 80 per cent of the hospital equipment was looted after the war, including medical equipment and even the air-conditioning, doors and windows. Before the war we used to see 600-700 outpatients-a-day. Now we are seeing half as many because of the lack of equipment and security even though demand is higher than ever.”
Getting aid to the Basra clinic has clearly not been a priority for Western donors. The International Red Cross cut funding and donor governments have bungled their aid efforts. Last November the clinic received around 250 artificial legs from DfID – almost six months after an urgent request was made. But vital joints were missing which meant that the limbs could not be used. French aid was scarcely better. During the UN sanctions on Iraq the French sent hundreds legs and feet that were so old the plastic was brittle and the pieces cracked.
Standing in the clinic’s storeroom, packed with boxes, Dr Yaqoub said with a sweep of his hand: “Most of this is aid cannot be used. We have no artificial arms at all and the legs we were sent are completely useless. Sometimes we mix-and-match different parts but it is not really a solution.”
One technician led me to a seven-year-old boy who had lost a leg. He had no limb to give, he explained to the boy’s father. The boy, a goat-herder whose life had been transformed when he stepped on a landmine near the Saudi Arabian border, smiled thinly.
In Misan the people have given up hope of aid arriving. Grass pokes between the rubble, dust prowls restlessly through the ruins and the school bus, gutted in the bombing, exudes a ghostly air.
As I drove away the sun was setting, a blood red smear behind a veil of smoke from kerosene cooking fires, and I watched the children’s dust-covered faces slip past the car window.
Had this village been a safe-haven, I wondered? No. Misan became the village of the damned.