It is headline news when coalition troops are injured or killed in Iraq but little mention is made of the millions of Iraqi children suffering from the ravages of war and even less is heard of the aid agencies' efforts to relieve them.
There are no clear figures yet on the numbers of children injured or killed in the war, not least because many are still falling victim to disease while others are being maimed by unexploded ordnance such as landmines and abandoned stockpiles of live ammunition.
'Children are still dying,' says Ian Lethbridge, emergency co-ordinator for Feed The Children, who visited Iraq in July. 'They are dying mostly now from waterborne diseases: typhoid and diarrhoea.
'When I was there, the hospitals in Baghdad were full of sick children.
Sick because of contaminated water. Without electricity you cannot pump water, the sanitation plants do not work, they back up and overflow. The intermittent electricity supply means businesses haven't started up so people are not working. They have no income - they are desperate.
Security problems
'But, the biggest problem is security. I think if people felt it was safe they could cope with the lack of electricity, lack of food. It is anarchy.
'Saddam released many criminals from prison just before the war. They have weapons and are driving around Baghdad hijacking.'
What is clear is that it will be months before life returns to normal for Iraq's children - although few of them have any knowledge of what we would call normality.
Save The Children Fund says before the war started the Iraqi population of 23 million, almost half of whom are under 14, was already experiencing a humanitarian crisis brought about by the first Gulf conflict and ensuing 12 years of sanctions. It estimates one in four children is chronically malnourished.
One in eight Iraqi children dies before their fifth birthday, according to Unicef, which says a recent nutrition survey of children in the capital city Baghdad found that the numbers of under-fives 'wasting away from malnutrition has doubled compared with last year's figures'.
A return to some sort of routine will help traumatised children, according to Mr Lethbridge. 'Their immune systems have been weakened by their poor diets. Then they have suffered bombing night after night for a month and then three months of chaos. Most children in Baghdad are traumatised by the war - they are having problems sleeping, they are bed wetting.'
Life in the cradle of civilisation has not always been so fragile. The charity Care International describes how before the first Gulf war in 1991, Iraq enjoyed a high standard of living with high levels of education, a good health system, access to water and sanitation thanks to oil revenues.
After the war, with the curb on oil sales and introduction of sanctions, the country rapidly plunged into a spiral of decline. The economy and infrastructure collapsed leading to scarce food, water, healthcare and schooling.
'The education system in Iraq was the envy of the Arab world,' says Kathryn Irwin of Unicef, who spent six weeks in Basra in May and June, and, unlike other nations in the region, was open to girls as well as boys. 'I found that I could speak to any woman of a certain age and she could reply in English but younger girls had not even been to school - things had deteriorated so much.
'There needs to be basic investment in water and sanitation. We need to get the basic tools of survival: water and food and there also needs to be longer-term investment in areas like education.'
Accordingly, Unicef is focusing on four key areas: water and sanitation, health, education, and child protection. The charity is sending in from Kuwait up to 100 water tankers a day, repairing water treatment plants and clearing rubbish and sewage to prevent so many children falling sick.
Untreated sewage
Ms Irwin graphically describes the stench from a vast moonscape of untreated sewage baking in the sun in a residential area of Basra. 'It was the size of four football pitches. It had become encrusted and children were playing round it.'
On the health front, Unicef has a mass immunisation programme targeting 4.2 million children aged under five and is supplying basic drugs to combat diarrhoea. It supported the printing and production of exam papers for primary and secondary school pupils at the end of the summer term and is organising a scheme to re-establish primary schools (see box).
Between the end of the war and early June there were more than 300 incidents of children being maimed and killed by landmines. 'In Northern Iraq, large areas were land-mined which has been a problem,' says Ms Irwin.
'We know there are thousands of munitions dumps where the Iraqi army left rockets and missiles. The weapons are stacked in wooden crates in large containers.
'The children are going into the containers and getting the wooden crates for fuel and these things are exploding. We are also getting a lot of children suffering flash burns. They are dismantling the rockets to extract the propellant, which looks like spaghetti. They are using them as fireworks or selling them for fuel. I saw them being sold for 10p. They just explode.
'We are working with organisations that are identifying these areas and making them safe. We are putting out an education campaign to get the message across that these things kill.'
Ms Irwin adds that Unicef is also working with street children. 'We know there are increasing numbers of children on the streets, especially in Baghdad. The numbers of street children had been increasing since before the first Gulf war but the former regime would not let Unicef get involved - they did not want to admit there was a problem.
'We are working with other organisations trying to find out exactly how many street children there are. We are looking into creating a drop-in centre. My colleagues in Iraq are working on the streets, talking to the children, getting to know them and gaining their trust.'
