Hilary Benn claims the government has spent millions on prosthetic limbs for Iraqi amputees, but there is little evidence for this, Lee Gordon tells him

A horribly wounded Ibtihal, aged 8, is pulled from the rubble of her house by her uncle Abu Shakir in the village of Misan

I listened to you with great interest the other day at a public meeting in east London. You spoke laudably of your government’s aims to help poorer countries – with much of the passion your father Tony Benn displayed as a politician.
When we spoke outside you looked me in the eyes and promised to investigate some of the issues I raised during the meeting.
But something jarred within me. I couldn’t help remembering some of the people I met in Iraq during the past two years.
Most are lost in a sea of faces but some stick out. For instance the children whose arms and legs were blown off in the war. Their faces – pale, almost spectral, sometimes pleading – swim, every now and again, before my eyes.
According to the best estimates of Iraqi health chiefs, doctors and British aid organisations, there are thousands of children like them in cities and villages across Iraq. Excuse me for being imprecise but nobody knows exactly how many amputees there are because we haven’t counted.
In your answer to the Parliamentary question put down by Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate Glenda Jackson you spoke of the millions of pounds your government has ploughed into Iraq through the World Health Organisation (Who) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
You said the Basra Prosthetics Centre, the only full-scale clinic in southern Iraq, has received artificial limbs from your government.
But I have to tell you there is little evidence of this largesse in the dilapidated corridors of the clinic and hospitals where fathers who have lost their legs sit with children who have lost arms wait for help.
The Basra clinic you spoke of has only three doctors – less than a fifth of the number needed to meet demand, according to the director, Doctor Kamal Yaqoub.

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.

The shortage means the clinic opens just a few hours a day. There is a desperate shortage of artificial legs and there are no artificial arms at all. I understand the ICRC is cutting its vital financial lifeline to the clinic.
Dr Yaqoub showed me the boxes of artificial feet and lower legs provided by your government. They were sent months after an urgent request by the hospital with parts missing. “Most of this is useless,” he told me. The clinic has to mix-and-match parts, some of which were made in the 1970s, predating Saddam. Many children are told there are no prosthetics at all for them.
Is this the best we can do for them, Hilary?
Dr Yaqoub looked me in the eye – as you did – and asked me to help. He pressed the printout of an email into my hand. It was a request to your government for aid – for four caravans.
Apparently four caravans will transform the clinic. Four doctors quit the clinic to return to Baghdad so that they could be with their families. The clinic would like to hire four more doctors and move them and their families from Baghdad, where there are 70 or so specialists. But the clinic cannot afford accommodation for them and proposed buying the caravans to put them up.
They made a request to DfID late last year, internal emails show. Has the hospital taken delivery of the four caravans yet, Hilary?
Not far from the clinic and from the headquarters where your officials work in Basra, is a village called Misan. There I spoke to children who lost legs, knees and suffered horrific injuries when it was bombed by Allied forces. The village has barely changed. Desert dust swirls between breezeblock homes pockmarked by shrapnel, grass grows between the rubble where several houses were flattened by the bomb, which half-buried a car and blasted a school bus.
I counted half-a-dozen children among the 30 or so who thronged my cameraman and I. One girl I met called Ibtihal was a deaf-mute as a result of medical shortages caused by the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s – which the British government supported. She was just eight years-old when her family was killed by the bomb. She was rescued but lost her leg.
Another girl, Shaima, 17, suffered an horrific injury to her knee. She was caught in the blast as she carried her siblings to safety from the blast. Her mother had to dig them from under the rubble.
As I sat on the stone floor of her family’s breezeblock house, Shaimia’s injured leg rigid in front of her, she spoke bashfully of her heroic act. On the way out her mother whispered that Shaima ought to have been courting but, well, she shrugged and said there was little chance now. Shaima’s eyes had the wistful look of someone who hardly dares to hope for a better life.
It was in the Misan blast that Zeynab, the 11-year-old girl who came to Britain last year for treatment, lost her leg and 17 of her family. Thanks to donations Zeynab got an artificial leg. But, back with her father in Iraq, she needs more treatment. It’s still not available in Iraq and she might have to come back here.
Will your department fund more limbs for children, more doctors for the clinic, or micro-projects like buying caravans, or a van for a mobile clinic?
I look forward to your reply.