Every morning Bakr Al-Saied wakes with only one thought: to find the 130 children who fled the Al-Rahma orphanage and took to Baghdad’s mean streets while their home was being looted and burned. We’ve been looking for them all day and all night. We take a car with UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) and drive around the city,said Saied, a volunteer at the orphanage in the poor Al-Rashid eastern suburbs. We don’t have any idea where they are,he said. Al-Rahma was not a great place for children even before the US-led war to oust the regime of Saddam Hussein. The children say they were regularly beaten. But Saied remembers the morning three weeks ago when it turned into a nightmare. After the Americans came, an official from the Social Ministry came to the gate and told us to open everything. He took the television and the equipment and food and drove away in his car,he said. Then the other people came. They broke everything. They set the pharmacy on fire. Many of the children were screaming and crying. They started to run away and we couldn’t stop them,he said. There had been 160 children at Al-Rahma. Now, about 30 have come back and several more have been found by the volunteers looking for them. One of those who came back was Ahmed, a rough-looking 16-year-old abandoned by his parents when he was born and whose left leg was crippled in a car accident three years ago. Giving a tour of the building while walking with crutches, he says his leg was the only reason he did not make it as far as his friends. Now he goes with the UNICEF officials to try to convince others it is safe to return. Dirty children wander around aimlessly. Piles of garbage and flies are everywhere. Mattresses are scattered on the floors. The stench from the fire lingers in the air. In hidden rooms, there is crying. Baghdad’s chief officer for UNICEF, which has started to deliver food and supplies, Hatim George Hatim, recalled what happened at Al-Rahma. Some were taken in by the neighbors, but many, many have run away. Nobody knows where they are. So the teachers at the school and others are going around looking for them,he said. At the door to Al-Rahma, two serious looking men now stand guard with Kalashnikov rifles. They say they will shoot anyone who tries to loot the place again as it starts to be rebuilt and the children come back. Asked whether they expect the missing ones to be found, they simply say Inshallah if God wills it. But they add grimly that if they don’t, there will be more orphans from the war to take their places. Meanwhile, a United Nations watchdog warned yesterday that war damage to sanitation and electricity systems, coupled with worsening pollution, had aggravated Iraq’s environmental crisis and posed a threat to health. The report, issued in Geneva by the UN Environment Program, called for urgent action to restore Iraq’s water and sewerage system, clean up pollution hot spots and eradicate piles of rubbish and medical waste to reduce the risk of epidemics. It also suggested scientists carry out a risk assessment of sites struck by US depleted-uranium (DU) munitions and that the Iraqi public be given advice on how to avoid potential exposure to DU. Many environmental problems in Iraq are so alarming that an immediate assessment and a cleanup plan are needed urgently, the chairman of the UNEP study group, Pekka Haavisto, said. The environment must be fully integrated into all reconstruction plans if the country is to achieve a strong and sustainable recovery. The report is a so-called desk study that provides an overview of the environmental situation in Iraq but is not based on on-site knowledge. It said that the 2003 Iraqi conflict had added to environmental stress from the 1991 Gulf War, the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and the mismanagement and abuses of the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein. Accumulated damage to water and sanitation systems had led to higher levels of pollution and health risks. Continuous electricity cuts had often stopped the pumps that remove sewage and circulate freshwater. International aid agencies, however, are striving to maintain their distance from the US occupation, fearing their humanitarian operations may start to overlap with those of the military. But US Army officers here insist they are willing to work with them. They say any coordination would be to keep aid workers safe amid efforts to rebuild a country shattered by two Gulf wars and years of UN sanctions, as well as a war with Iran that ended in 1988 with a million dead on both sides. We are in regular contact with the Americans who will be in charge of hospitals,said Nada Doumani of the International Committee of the Red Cross. But we would never compromise our special international status that means we are accepted everywhere in the world. We would never work with any military in the world under any context,she said.