Bombings not dissimilar to this occur on a near-daily basis in Iraq. Sadly, these are generally what catches the headlines – as most corporate media outlets choose to report these, or nothing at all, or how much better things have become in Iraq as of late.

What continues to be missed is the deep suffering within the country that is cutting through the Iraqi people like a vicious incurable cancer, which is how most Iraqis continue to perceive the occupation.

Nowadays, at least 150 Iraqi children per year are being sold into child trafficking rings, a growing crisis that is gripping Iraq. Iraqi children are being abducted by the scores on an annual basis, and are being sold both internally and abroad. Some of the bartered youngsters become sex abuse victims.

On April 6, The Guardian reported, “Criminal gangs are profiting from the cheap cost of buying infants and the bureaucratic muddle that makes it relatively easy to move them overseas. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain because there is no centralized counting procedure, but aid agencies and police say they believe numbers have increased by a third since 2005 to at least 150 children a year.”

One senior police officer reported that at least 15 Iraqi children were sold every month, some overseas, some internally, some for adoption, some for sexual abuse.

The paper continued, “Officials believe at least 12 gangs are operating in Iraq, offering between £200 and £4,000 per child, depending on its background and health. The main countries in which they are sold are Jordan, Turkey, Syria and some European countries including Switzerland, Ireland, the UK, Portugal and Sweden – One dealer, who asked to be called Abu Hamizi, said child trafficking from Iraq was cheaper and easier than elsewhere, given the readiness of underpaid government employees to help with the falsification of documents We prefer babies but sometimes families request children from one to four years old but they are rare cases.”

A 2007 report by the NGO Heartland Alliance showed that traffickers regularly employed the threat or use of coercion, abduction, force, fraud, deception, abuse of vulnerability or giving payments or benefits to a person in control of the victim.

One of the child traffickers told The Guardian that he heard one of the babies sold last year was used for organ transplants.

Why such desperation among the people of Iraq? It requires little imagination to understand their dilemma. The country was heavily bombed in 1991 by the United States, then bombed throughout the strangling twelve and a half years of economic sanctions-also led by the US, then invaded and beset with a torturous occupation now into its seventh year. The bright and shining promises of “reconstruction” and “rehabilitation” were, of course, simply part of the worst kind of propaganda used to justify an illegal act of aggression against a sovereign country.

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