Murawski says these are mostly the places where the wealthy are building huge mansions. Then he visited a part of the Iraqi capital called Saddam City, which he described as the American version of a ghetto. There, he saw a terribly run-down hospital full of children seriously ill and not able to get the care they need. He also recounted how the school he visited was woefully underfunded. Some teachers were making the equivalent of a few dollars a month and the furniture in the teachers' lounge had to be sold to pay for supplies.
Clean water is also hard to come by in Iraq as is enough food and proper disposal of raw sewage.
The Gulf War may have caused much of this misery, but these worsening conditions are only aggravated by the ongoing sanctions. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children, have died because of the sanctions. At one point, as many as 4,500 children were dying per month because of the lack of adequate food and medicine, according to a 1997 report by the United Nations' International Children's Emergency Fund. Still, the rich remain largely unaffected, Murawski says, while Iraq's more vulnerable citizens suffer for the sins of both the Iraqi and American governments. He says the government there is trying to help its citizens.