Scopical

Desperate Iraqis resort to selling their children

Despite American optimism at Iraq's gradual stabilisation, local officials and international aid workers are concerned at the alarming countrywide numbers of missing and disappeared Iraqi children, unwittingly sold by poverty-stricken parents to child traffickers for the sex industry, cheap labour and organ transplants on the black market.

Omar Khalif, vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA) told Aljazeera news agency that at least two children are sold every week and another four are reported missing. The numbers have increased by 20% over 2006.

Police investigations have also revealed that many children, aged one month to five years, bearing false documents and heavily sedated, are smuggled across the borders to be sold to foreign couples or specialised gangs in many European countries like the Netherlands and Sweden as well as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Iraqi Government forces have stepped up border security and police patrols, resorting to waking and interviewing older children at border crossings. In the past nine months fifteen human trafficking gangs operating throughout the country have been captured.

Many children can be sold for as little as USD3000 ($3500 Australian) while babies can fetch as much as USD30,000 ($35000 Australian) a senior Interior Ministry official told the Arab English language network.

"Extreme poverty and nationwide unemployment have pushed desperate and anguished parents into the unthinkable and many believe that they can save their children's lives to guarantee them a better future by giving them up for adoption," Mahmoud Saeed, a senior official at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs said.

"Their anguish torments them," Khalid Jabboury, 38, a father of seven living in a displaced person's camp on the outskirts of Baghdad said. Mr Jabboury said a year after he had given up his own seven year-old daughter for adoption to a Jordanian family, he heard from relatives that she had been sighted working as a servant for the supposed new family and that she was also being beaten.

He said he would return the USD20,000 ($23500 Australian) he was paid if a local NGO would repatriate his daughter.

Ruwaida Saleh, 31, a Mother of three said she has had nightmares that her eight year old daughter Hala is being raped, ever since she disappeared six months ago.

"I will hold God's hands and beg him to have Hala in my arms again one day. It is a pain without explanation that I will carry to my coffin if never find her," she said.

But once children have been taken out of Iraq, Khalif said, there is nothing the NGOs can do.

According to a 2007 UNICEF (United Nations Children's Emergency Fund) report, some 25,000 Iraqi children are displaced every month by violence or intimidation with their families seeking shelter in other parts of Iraq. Some 2 Million children also face threats, poor nutrition, disease and interrupted education.