In the summer of 2003, I traveled to Baghdad, where I collaborated with a friend and reported for Salon.com http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/08/28/babies/, and kept a blog http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/baghdad/ through the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

One of the stories we reported in August was about relief-agency medicine stock-piled in warehouses not making it to Baghdad’s children’s hospital wards, where children were dying of simple ailments like diarrhea. We talked with some of the children and their mothers and fathers, and I photographed some of the boys and girls lying in beds. They hoped to get better, of course, lying there waiting for medicine.

In many ways August of that year was a pivotal point, a time when many Iraqis were watching their hopes swing back towards gloomy resignation. The Americans were their hope, and yet, American officials and soldiers had fortified themselves behind the walls of the Green Zone, in Saddam’s palaces, which for most Iraqi people were symbols of their humiliation and oppression. There was a sense that these men who had come to save them were now untouchable. If things were changing for the better, then the progress was slow, barely discernable.

That month the Jordanian Embassy was bombed, the United Nations office was bombed, UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed. There were kidnappings and killings daily, mostly involving Iraqi civilians. People died in the crime-ridden streets, in car accidents, in  hospitals. They died, caught in crossfires, in U.S. bombardments from the ground and air, in mosques and marketplaces, killed by suicide bombers. Violence and conflict destroyed what little remained of normal life: Everything became unpredictable:  electricity and water, sewage and sanitation, law enforcement and medical care. The disruptions lead to more casualties. Many of those casualties were children.

Adam Shemper
www.shemperphoto.com