Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - families fight back

"He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It's a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing." And all the while his father talks, five-year-old Sayef Ala'a sits obediently on the sofa beside us, doing as his father tells him, moving his head to show us the scrappy bit of flesh that constitutes his left ear, tipping his head to one side so we can take pictures of it. Compared to other children with birth deformities, Sayef Ala'a is lucky. He can see, breathe, walk, run, play and listen to his father and friends with his right ear. And he is a little boy of much courage. "He hasn't learnt much yet – that's because he hasn't been to school," his father says. "I'm worried he would be bullied at school. He's a child, but sometimes he comes to me and says he knows he has a deformed ear; but it doesn't matter, he says, because he has no other problems. He is shy but he doesn't mind seeing you." And here the father points at us as we sit beside his son on the sofa. "But no other foreigners come to see him." Like others in Fallujah, Sayef Ala'a's father, who is a businessman, hopes that NGO officials will turn up at his door one day and offer the boy a foreign visa, medical treatment abroad, education. It is a dream that will never be realised – not so long as even the Iraqi government takes no interest in the deformed children of Fallujah.