No wonder they love us.

During Yassen's shift the day before yesterday at Alwiya, two newborns died because he lacked the right supplies to treat them. One had septicemia; the other died of respiratory failure. Yassen had no luminal to treat the septicemia patient -- its seizures worsened and it died. He had no ventilator machine for the child whose lungs had given out. Nor did he have any surfactant to help get oxygen into the child's arteries. Yassen and the other doctors gathered around say at least one baby dies in the hospital every day, but they can't estimate how many of those die because of the lack of drugs. "Many," is all they can say, shaking their heads, smiles lingering on their lips.

Basic medicines are missing, the doctors tell us. In the case of newborns, whose immune systems are still weak, these medicines can mean life or death: Phenobarbital or luminal for seizures; immune globulin and surfactant for respiratory distress; and calcium supplements for premature infants, which the hospital has not had in stock for the last six months.

Last week was the height of diarrhea season, a common ailment during summer because of the blistering heat and lack of clean water in Iraq. It was the worst possible time to run out of ringer lactate, a fluid to revitalize severely dehydrated babies, but that's what happened at Alwiya. Yassen and the other doctors gave the children a much less effective saline solution as a substitute, but one doctor called it "show business" to fool parents into thinking they were doing something. They've watched at least 100 children die of diarrhea since the war.

Children who have diarrhea are not supposed to die in hospitals, but here they do. "I have seen 20 die with my own eyes," says another doctor, Ihsan Jassim al Douri, his eyes widening. "You ask another doctor, you get a different number." He smiles.

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