(1888PressRelease)
October 27, 2006 - 10.27.06 (Toronto) Today, the Chairman of Veteran Organ Donors International Bruce A. Gorcyca, also a U.S. military veteran, announced that their volunteer group received information from two independent sources in Baghdad that Iraqi children as young as 5 and 6 years old were being pulled from their classrooms and privately interrogated by U.S. soldiers in uniforms about their fathers. The children were asked if they wanted to be “mujahadin” when they grow up and those that responded with a “yes” were then asked if their fathers were “Mujahadin”. If they again answered “yes” the children were taken away and held hostage until their fathers surrendered themselves for interrogation that could last for weeks, as they have in the past. Historically, less than half of those interrogated are ever released.
We received this information from the same source that told us of Iraqi mothers and wives being taken from their homes in 2005 in much the same manner by U.S. troops who then offered to release the women only if their husbands and sons would surrender and submit interrogation under the influence of drugs . ABC News later confirmed that story to be true a few weeks after we received the information. “I consider these tactics to be barbaric, un-American, and shameful” said Gorcyca. “Some members of the Arab League have suggested this may be yet another potential war crime, and we want the United Nations to establish a war crime commission to look into this immediately” he added.
Just last week VODI published an open letter to the United Nations, U.S. Congress, and Parliament demanding that the death of over 5,000 Iraqi children from American bombs, missiles, and bullets be investigated. The group is now trying to attend to the some 3,000 Iraqi children in need of organ transplants due to injuries received from the last two invasions over the last decade. Extensive use of radioactive depleted uranium weapons by coalition forces has almost doubled the leukemia rate of Iraqi children who are now in desperate need of bone marrow transplants. “Iraqi parents take no comfort in the fact their children were not killed or maimed deliberately” remarked Gorcyca who further explained “It is not hard to understand the growing insurgency in Iraq which may be nothing more than enraged citizens seeking revenge for the death of their children or parents”. The Toronto-based human rights group is staffed by volunteer veterans of the U.S. and Canadian military.
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