Orphans in Iraq's Storm

Athier Hamed first came to the Baghdad orphanage two years ago when his mother died suddenly and his father, he said, "lost his mind."

"He got angrier and angrier with me, and hurt me like it was nothing," said Athier, soft-spoken and slender, pulling up his sleeves to show waxy scars on his wrists from handcuffs he said his father, in a fit of rage, tried to weld to his arms.

Before the U.S. invasion in 2003, about 400 children lived in Iraqi orphanages. By early 2006, that number had grown to nearly 1,000, according to government statistics. Islamic society considers it shameful to abandon children to public care, but officials say war and economic hardship are taking their toll on families.

Fearing for his life, Athier, now 13, ran away, talking a bus driver into giving him a ride to the Iraqi capital from his small home town in the western province of Anbar. Police took him to the First House for the Child, founded in 2003 as the number of abandoned and orphaned children in the Iraqi capital began to surge.

Read the rest at the Washington Post