NEW YORK — Almost a year after the Iraq war began, Ahmed Sharif, then just 6 years old, had a strange feeling as he walked home from school on an empty Baghdad street.

"It was quite scary to walk alone on that street which was completely deserted, apart from a group of American soldiers who were pointing their guns at me," said the now 15-year-old Sharif.

Then, a bomb exploded, tearing off his right arm and blinding him.

But Sharif became one of a few victims of the now decade-long war who was sent to the United States for medical care, with the help of American-based aid organizations. He is one of still fewer who has started a new life here.

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New life in New York
Sharif found his way to the United States after his elder brother, Saad, registered him with a U.S. military treatment center in Baghdad in early 2004. From there his case was referred to the New York-based Global Medical Relief Fund, an nonprofit organization that provides treatment for young victims of war, natural disaster or illness.

Global Medical Relief Fund, based in New York, together with the Los Angeles-based Assyrian Medical Society, have brought about 50 war-affected Iraqi children to America for medical care.

"I heard about his case and I immediately flew to bring him to the U.S.," said Elissa Montanti, the 59-year-old founder of the Global Medical Relief fund. "I just felt his darkness, but he has a sense of humor, and that hope inspired me to help him."

Since its inception in 1997, the fund has helped 160 children from 22 different countries receive medical treatment. Afterwards some have resettled permanently in the United States, Canada or Europe, while others have returned to their home countries.

"We don't want to help more than eight to nine kids [in a year] because we want to treat our kids like family, not numbers," said Montanti whose organization is mainly funded through private donors.

The Iraq war had a devastating effect on Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi government estimates that 239,133 Iraqi nationals were injured from 2004 through 2011 due to "terrorism and acts of violence." But the severe shortage of physicians in Iraq means that many victims of the war have not gotten adequate medical attention.

While 34,000 physicians were registered with the Iraqi Medical Association in the 1990s, by 2008 there were only around 16,000 for the country of 31 million, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Due to his extreme disabilities, Sharif relocated to New York full-time and Montanti became his legal guardian so he could stay in the country.

He now goes to school to study braille, the language for the blind, among other classes. While Montati takes care of his basic needs, he lives with other kids receiving medical treatment in a four-bedroom house funded by the charity.

His best friend is his housemate Ngawang Tsestin, 15, who lost both arms in an accident in his native Tibet. Sharif is never expected to see again but, that has not stopped him from playing the piano and singing.

And he gets help from Tsestin.

"I am his hands and he is my eyes," says Sharif. "Whenever we watch a movie, he narrates it to me. And he helps me with walking on the road so that I don't run into people."

'Gave me hope'
On the West coast, the Los Angeles-based Assyrian Medical Society has helped 300 children from different countries, many from Iraq, receive medical treatment.

Samer Butrus was 12-year-old when he lost his left leg and was severely injured in his right leg after a bomb exploded on his family’s farm in northern Iraq. After waiting more than four years for medical help, Butrus's dad connected with a local representative of the society and he was sent to the United States for care in 2008.

"It's hard to live away from my family and friends, but if I were in Iraq, my life there would have been limited to a wheelchair," Butrus said in a telephone interview.

Now 21 years old, he is now studying business and aspires to be an accountant in Windsor, Canada, where he lives with his mother after being granted asylum there.

"I was in search of hope after my injury and that's exactly what the society gave me. They gave me hope of a better life," said Butrus. "Whatever happened is behind me, my leg won’t come back, every day is a new day now."

Related links: 

10 years later, Iraq's impact still pervades Republic Party 

Iraq War 10 Years Later: Where Are They Now?

Iraq, 10 years on: Did invasion bring 'hope and progress' to millions as Bush vowed? 

 

 

A boy of 12 sees his best friend shot through the heart. Another of 15 is held in a cell with 150 other people and taken out every day to be burned with cigarettes.

Syria's children are perhaps the greatest victims of their country's conflict, suffering "layers and layers of emotional trauma," Save the Children's chief executive Justin Forsyth told Reuters.

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Syrian children have been shot at, tortured and raped during two years of unrest and civil war, the London-based international charity said in a report released on Wednesday.

Two million children, it said, face malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma, becoming innocent victims of a conflict that has already claimed 70,000 lives.

"This is a war where women and children are the biggest casualty," Forsyth told Reuters during a visit to Lebanon, where 340,000 Syrians have sought a safe haven.

Forsyth said he met a Syrian refugee boy, 12, who saw his best friend killed outside a bakery. "His friend was shot through the heart. But initially, he thought he was joking because there was no blood. They didn't realize he had been killed until they took his shirt off," he said.

The report cited new research carried out among refugee children by Bahcesehir University in Turkey, which found that one in three reported having been punched, kicked or shot at.

Children directly targeted
Two-thirds of children surveyed said that they had been separated from members of their families because of the conflict and a third said they had experienced the death of a close friend or family member.

Millions of families have fled their homes for safer ground or neighboring countries. Save the Children says 80,000 people are living in barns, parks and caves, and children struggle to find enough to eat.

Both government forces and rebels have been accused of targeting civilians and committing war crimes. Refugees say Assad's soldiers are directly targeting children.

Forsyth said he met one child who said he was in a prison cell with 150 people, including 50 children. "He was taken out every day and put in a giant wheel and burned with cigarettes. He was 15."

Save the Children says that some young boys are being used by armed groups as porters, runners and human shields, bringing them close to the front line.

Rape is being used to deliberately punish people, Forsyth said, adding that it is underreported because of the sensitivity of the issue, especially in conservative communities.

Fear of sexual violence is repeatedly cited to Save the Children as one of the main reasons for families fleeing their homes, according to the report.

It said that there are also reports of early marriage of young girls by families trying to reduce the numbers of mouths they have to feed, or hoping that a husband will be able to provide greater security from the threat of sexual violence.

Forsyth said that he met a Syrian family in Lebanon who told their 16-year-old daughter to marry an older man. "Her mother said she is beautiful and every time the (Syrian) soldiers came to the house she thought: 'They are going to rape her.'"

"Rape is being used deliberately to punish people," Forsyth said, adding that girls as young as 14 are being married off.

Related:

'Human river' of Syrian refugees hits 1 million

Analysis: Can aid without weapons help resolve Syrian conflict?

US to send rations, medical supplies to Syrian rebels

 

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MOSCOW — Russia's upper house of parliament approved a bill on Wednesday that would prohibit Americans from adopting Russian children and impose other measures in retaliation for a U.S. law designed to punish Russians accused of human rights violations. 

The bill would also outlaw some U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations and impose visa bans and asset freezes on Americans accused of violating the rights of Russians abroad.

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The bill was endorsed by the lower house last week and is now expected to be sent to President Vladimir Putin to sign.

Putin hasn't committed to signing the bill, but referred to it as a legitimate response to the new U.S. law.

It is one part of a larger measure by angry lawmakers retaliating against a recently signed U.S. law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators. 

The U.S. law is primarily intended to end Cold War-era trade restrictions and was hailed by U.S. businesses worried about falling behind in the race to win shares of Russia's more open market, but its human rights part has outraged Putin's government.

Dubbed the Magnitsky Act, the U.S. legislation is named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested by officials he accused of a $230-million tax fraud.

He was repeatedly denied medical treatment and in 2009 died after almost a year in jail after being severely beaten by guards.

Opportunity denied
Some top Russian officials, including the foreign minister, have spoken flatly against the Russian bill, arguing that the measure would be in violation with Russia's constitution and international obligations.

Earlier Wednesday, several protesters were detained outside the upper house as it prepared to make its decision.

Boy's Christmas wish: Adoption of little brother caught in US-Russia spat

"Children get frozen in the Cold War," one poster read.

Critics of the bill say it victimizes orphans by depriving them of an opportunity to escape often-dismal Russian orphanages.

Americans may lose right to adopt Russian kids

There are about 740,000 children without parental custody in Russia, according to UNICEF. More than 60,000 Russian children have been adopted in the United States in the past 20 years.

The Russian bill is named in honor of Dima Yakovlev, a Russian toddler who was adopted by Americans and then died in 2008 after his father left him in a car in broiling heat for hours.

See the US Action Plan on Children in Adversity

The father was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Russian lawmakers argue that by banning adoptions to the U.S. they would be protecting children and encouraging adoptions inside Russia.

Russian children’s rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov told the Interfax news agency that 46 children who were about to be adopted by U.S. citizens would stay in Russia — despite court rulings in some of these cases authorizing the adoptions.

Astakhov also insisted that all adoptions would be halted once the bill is signed by Putin, but a senior lawmaker at the Federation Council insisted it cannot be enacted immediately.

Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Council's foreign affairs committee, said that a bilateral Russian-U.S. agreement binds Russia to notify of a halt in adoptions 12 months in advance.

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Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

This Christmas, the best gift 7-year-old Jack Thomas could get would be the arrival of his little brother, Nikoly, who lives in an orphanage in Kursk, Russia.

"When Jack is asked about his family, he talks about his brother," said his father, John Thomas, speaking from the family’s home in Minnetonka, Minn. "He always asks, 'When is he coming home?' We just tell him we’re waiting for the call."

Jack has been waiting several years, a long time for a little boy. What he doesn’t know is that a feud between politicians in Moscow and Washington could destroy his chance to grow up with his brother.

On Friday, Russian lawmakers passed a bill that would prohibit Americans from adopting Russian children, and if that bill is signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, it would cast doubt on even those adoptions already in the pipeline.

For John Thomas and his wife, Renee — and very likely hundreds of other expectant American families and Russian children — the latest political shift could mean a delay, a new hurdle or a brick wall.

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The U.S. State Department and some high-level officials in Moscow have lambasted the legislation as punishing Russian children who need families in an effort to retaliate against Washington.

But the bill has gained ground amid a wave of nationalism, fueled by anger over a U.S. human rights bill singling out Russia and by several highly publicized cases of U.S. adoptions that ended tragically.

Since the end of the Soviet era in 1991, Americans have adopted about 60,000 children from Russia, making it one of the main countries of origin for non-domestic adoptions in the United States, according to U.S. government statistics. At the peak of the trend in 2004, Americans brought 5,862 children into their homes. In 2011, the number was down to 962 — a product of well-intentioned policy shifts, bureaucracy, corruption and other difficulties.

See the US Action Plan on Children in Adversity

Even with foreign adoptions, which are allowed after giving Russians priority, Russia has an estimated 700,000 children living in institutions, nearly 80,000 of them orphaned, and the rest abandoned or taken away by the state because the parents were judged unfit to take care of them.

The Thomases have experienced the painful, stop-start nature of the Russian adoption process in their quest for Nikoly.

It was in December 2008, when they were finalizing their adoption of 3-year-old Eduard, whom they named Jack, that they learned he had a baby brother. They started the adoption application process for Nikoly as soon as they could, after a required waiting period.

A year later, John and Renee Thomas, who work as an attorney and a building contract negotiator, again flew to Moscow and then went by rail to Kursk to meet Nikoly, whom they call Theodore or Teddy. He was 18 months old. Renee Thomas says she thought it would take about the same amount of time to adopt him as it had with Jack, and expected to travel to Kursk sometime in the spring of 2010 to get him.

The Thomases are still waiting.

One of the reasons for delay, they say, is the horror caused by a woman in Tennessee who put her 7-year-old son, whom she had adopted in Russia, on a one-way flight to Moscow in 2010, with the explanation that the child was "mentally unstable" and she could no longer take care of him.

In another delay that Renee Thomas believes cost their adoption another year, the Russian government shut down adoptions for review and re-accreditation of all adoption agencies that work in Russia.

In addition, the Thomas’ dossier has gone before a series of judges in Russia, some of whom have rejected it without a stated reason, and others setting forth requirements that they are not able to meet under U.S. law. Even so, there are Russians trying to help them run the gauntlet, and they figured the problems would get ironed out.

"We expected to be traveling soon" to get Nikolai, said John Thomas.  

Just last month, when a newly negotiated bilateral adoptions agreement came into effect, designed to smooth out the process and help safeguard adopted children, things appeared to be looking up.

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"These adoptive parents have really been through the ringer," said Johnson. "This was a bilateral treaty signed by our two governments. We really celebrated it. I thought we could turn our attention to other countries. But we’re really back to Russia again."

Kids pay in human rights spat
The ban that passed the Russian parliament grew out of a dispute over human rights.

On Nov. 16, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act passed by a landslide in the U.S. House and Senate. Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who exposed massive fraud allegedly committed by a group of Russian officials. He was arrested and died in police custody 11 months later under suspicious circumstances. Among other things, the bill denies visas and freezes assets of the Russian officials implicated by Magnitsky.

The new U.S. law sparked an angry reaction from Moscow and fueled popular anti-American sentiment.

Vladimir Putin said that the law singling out Russia "contaminates our relations."

Russian legislators then drafted a bill to counter the U.S. law, with provisions restricting organizations and individuals linked to the United States.

Just before the first vote in the Duma, the proposed ban on American adoptions of Russian children was tacked on as an amendment. The legislation was named after 21-month-old Dima Yakovlev, a Russian boy who died in Virginia after his adoptive father left him alone in a hot SUV for nine hours.

Americans may lose right to adopt Russian kids

After the Duma approved the legislation on Friday, the U.S. State Department registered its disapproval.

"If Russian officials have concerns about the implementation of (the adoption) agreement, we stand ready to work with them to improve it and remain committed to supporting inter-country adoptions between our two countries," said acting State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell. "The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to political aspects of our relationship."

The bill is now heading for Putin’s desk for his signature.

Opponents of the ban are still hoping that the president will veto the bill, despite his comments while campaigning for re-election that U.S. adoptions should no longer be allowed. More recently he has remained silent on the issue.

Over the past week, Russian opponents of the ban have launched petitions and small protests at the parliament building, and several high-level officials have registered strong opposition to it, including Russia’s foreign minister and education minister.

Johnson of the National Council for Adoption says he’s hoping the domestic opposition will dissuade Putin from signing the adoption ban into law.

"One good thing that’s happening … is a movement brought on by Russian citizens and the foreign minister who has spoken out against this legislation … saying it’s not the right way to stick it to America,” he said. "Hopefully more politicians will feel comfortable speaking out."

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Barring that, he said, he hopes Russia will at least make provisions to finalize the adoptions that are already in process.

"There is a precedent … to negotiate pipeline cases," he said, citing examples in Guatemala and Kyrgystan. "But given the animosity that Russians feel towards this, I hope that’s not a conversation we have to have."

For the Thomases, despite politics, the adoption effort is now in overdrive. They understand that Nikoly, who turned 4 in June, could be moved at any time — and in fact may have been moved already to a Russian institution for children as old as 18.

"That's major," said John Thomas. "That's where bad things start to happen."

For Renee Thomas, her greatest fear is that the boys will not be allowed to grow up together. But she tries to stay positive for Jack.

"This morning as I was making him breakfast, he said 'Mom, wouldn't it be great if we woke up Christmas morning and Santa left presents and Teddy under the tree?' My response was 'Let's hope for next year.'"

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Russia's parliament on Wednesday gave overwhelming preliminary approval to a measure banning Americans from adopting Russian children, a harsh retaliatory move against U.S. human rights legislation.

But the proposal appears to be too extreme for some senior Russian officials. The foreign minister and the education minister spoke out flatly against an adoption ban, and the speaker of the upper house of parliament, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, suggested the lower house members were letting emotions overtake rationality.

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Putin himself, who has the authority to veto legislation, has made no public comment on the adoption provision. But his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, indicated Wednesday the Russian leader regards it as excessive.

Peskov told the Interfax news agency that, although Putin understands the emotions that prompted the move, "the executive powers are taking a more restrained line."

Before becoming law, the measure has to pass a third reading in the State Duma, which is set for Friday, after which it would go to the upper house, the Federation Council, and then require Putin's signature.

The legislation further steps up animosity with Washington by calling for closure of political organizations in Russia that receive American funding.

Deep freeze across Russia dips to 50 below, at least 45 die

Both strictures were included as amendments in the second reading in the State Duma of a bill prompted by last week's signing by President Barack Obama of a U.S. law that allows sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators.

Resentment and retaliation
The U.S. law reopened a vein of deep resentment among many Russians over the United States' alleged meddling in Russian domestic affairs and Washington's perceived penchant for treating Moscow with condescension.

Putin has accused the U.S. of funding the wave of protests that rose against him over the past year and strongly criticized the new U.S. law.

Many Russians have long bristled at the adoption of Russian children by Americans, sensitive to the implication that Russians are hard-hearted or economically unable to take care of their own. The resentment is fanned by cases of abuse or deaths of Russian children adopted by Americans.

The anger hit the boiling point in 2010 when an American woman sent back a 7-year-old Russian boy she had adopted, saying he had behavioral problems and she didn't want him anymore.

Russian gay rights activists stage 'kiss-in' protest

In the wake of that scandal, and after long delay, Russia in July ratified an agreement with the U.S. on regulating adoptions. If the measure approved on Wednesday becomes law, Russia would abrogate that agreement.

Backers of the measure complain that the agreement is enforced poorly and that American courts are too lenient.

"Cases of the death of our children in the United States continue, and cases of not-guilty verdicts; we decided to take this tough decision to deprive Americans of the right to adopt Russian children," said Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Duma's foreign relations committee.

Civic organizations fight for life
Despite the cases of adopted-children abuse in the U.S., opponents of the Russian measure say blocking adoptions ultimately punishes innocent kids.

The lawmakers "with impotent spite want to take revenge, but can't take revenge on Americans so try to recoup with children," Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia's most prominent human-rights activists, was quoted as saying by Interfax. "Instead of going to a country where they will try to be treated or at least be with families, they will stay to suffer here, in children's homes."

There are about 740,000 children without parental custody in Russia, according to UNICEF. Russians historically have been less inclined to adopt children than in many other cultures.

Russia threatens to ban Americans over human-rights abuses

"Our deputies in the State Duma act absolutely like terrorists," said Oleg Orlov, head of the rights group Memorial. "They are fighting their external enemy — U.S. congressmen and senators, but .... take peaceful people as hostages: ourselves, the citizens of their own country, members of the civic movement, and children."

Civic organizations are likely to suffer in the provision on blocking U.S.-funded political organizations. A law passed this summer already requires non-governmental organizations that both receive funding from abroad and engage in political activity to register as "foreign agents;" as with the proposed new measure, a vague definition of what constitutes "political activity" could be used to crack down broadly.

The entire Russian retaliatory measure is being called the Dima Yakovlev bill, honoring a Russian-born toddler who died in the U.S. after his adoptive father left him in an automobile in the broiling heat for several hours. The father later was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

The U.S. law, called the Magnitsky Act, stems from the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was arrested after accusing officials of a $230 million tax fraud. He was repeatedly denied medical treatment and died in jail in 2009. Russian rights groups claimed he was severely beaten and accused the Kremlin of failing to prosecute those responsible.

The amended bill passed by the Duma on Wednesday also says any country that passes legislation similar to the Magnitsky Act also will be subject to an adoption ban.

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