Baghdad out of order.

• Author: Rosen Nir

Scenes from Baghdad, late May and June. On a field in the Jihad neighborhood is every little boy's fantasy. Several dozen abandoned Iraqi tanks lie beside bushes and palm trees. their treads do not work, so they are immobile, but they have plenty of ammunition. Fifty feet away are mud houses, with cows lying beneath the shade of a tree. A group of local boys deftly avoids the cluster bombs on the ground and climbs on the tanks.

Eleven-year-old Ali and his friends are timid at first, afraid they will incur punishment if they admit to having frolicked amidst the tanks. A dollar encourages them to proudly demonstrate their familiarity with the field and the location of the many cluster bombs hiding among the bushes. Looters have stripped parts of the tanks. The barefoot boys in ragged clothes go inside the tanks, pointing to the rows of shells, and then they climb up on the turret.

Across town in Shaab City, five-year-old Fahad gleefully holds a propellant rod removed from Iraqi explosives. He lights one end, watching as a ball of fire races down the rod to his hand. Then he tosses the flaming rod onto the ground where it shoot around in circles. His three-year-old sister holds a rod in her mouth. Their uncle displays the many large caliber rounds he has found in an abandoned Iraqi ammunition dump that was looted.

Salam Muhamad, a thirty-year-old shepherd, is rushed into a Baghdad emergency room of the Al-Nur General Hospital. He lies half naked, an arm hanging down to the floor, a pool of blood below him, his breathing slow, forced, and failing. His relatives sit on the floor outside, wailing, crying, and beating themselves as they praise him and lament the loss of their sole provider. An American cluster bomb exploded in his face. Doctors don't have the necessary supplies to save him. They simply stare, while the cries of his relatives echo through the halls. Muhamad's breathing ceases, his head lolls to the side, and he dies.

The American and British occupation forces estimate that in Baghdad alone there are 700 sites containing UXOs (unexploded ordnance), abandoned missiles, armored vehicles, and tanks. Baghdadis will have to wait years before their city is free from the dangerous detritus of war that Americans dropped and the Iraqi military abandoned.

On streets throughout Baghdad, people lay down their wares, hoping that buyers will be interested in the screws, pipes, sneakers, computers, soccer balls, AK-47s, and grenade launchers they...