At night, 11-year-old Salah Abbas Hisham wakes up screaming. Sometimes, in the dark, he silently attacks the boy next to him in a tiny Baghdad orphanage where 33 boys sleep on cots or on the floor.Salah, who saw both his parents blown apart in a car bomb blast two years ago, can never be left alone at night, said Ahmed Abdul-Baqi, the night shift social worker at the Safe House, a private orphanage in Baghdad. "He wakes up in the night and tries to hit or even to choke the boy beside him," said Abdul-Baqi.
His hands always trembling and unable to speak properly, Salah is one of an army of uncounted orphans left behind by six years of sectarian slaughter and insurgency that was unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq...
| And the 30 years of Ba'athist rule that preceded it ... |