Khalil is four years old. Thanks to your help, he may live to see five

Help came too late for Samar Khdair, the little girl whose face became a symbol of `The Independent' cancer appeal for the child victims of the Gulf War. She died just days before drugs - paid for with pounds 100,000 of donations from readers - arrived in Iraq. But where there was once despair on the `Ward of Death', now there is hope

DR SELMA al-Haddad is the kind of doctor whom you would select for your own terminal illness. She cuddles the children whom she knows will soon die, she jokes with 13-year-old Karrar Abdel-Emir, who is frightened of his own leukaemia, but too frightened to take the drugs which may save him. She introduced me to each child by name without ever looking at the chart at the bottom of the beds to check their identity. "Now here is Cherou Jassem and she has put on a party dress for you to take her picture," Dr Selma laughs.

And the beautiful little girl in the sun bonnet - her name means "budding rose'' - who has acute myloblastic leukaemia smiles with delight.

Amna Ahmed sits, bald, radiant, a kind of tranquillity about her baby face, framed in my camera lens by the electric fan which cools her fever. The machine, fighting the heat of the Baghdad afternoon, becomes a kind of halo round her head, an angel from Babylon, who is dying of an abdominal mass.

"Yes, of course I'm depressed and frustrated," Dr al-Haddad says. "I can't save many of these children - but what can I do? I have a sense of responsibility towards these poor children. Most times, I feel helpless." She asks if I will send the copies of my photographs of the children to Baghdad, as soon as I can. I know the reason for her urgency. Some of these children will live with the drugs which Independent readers have sent to Iraq. Others will not. In a month or two, Amna may well be dead. Cherou too.

It is impossible to visit the cancer wards of Mansour hospital without a feeling of anger. Even when the children have the drugs they need for leukaemia, blood platelets are not being made fast enough in Iraq, because the machine which separates the blood needs maintenance. UN sanctions have broken the back of the hospital system.

We - in the most literal sense of the word - are partly responsible for all this, we who accept the UN sanctions against Iraq, the sanctions which clearly harm these children and which, equally clearly, do not harm Saddam Hussein. But there is another reason for cynicism as well as indignation.

For each bed at which I stop, there is usually a parent - sometimes illiterate but memory as alert as a knife - who has a grim and familiar story to tell me about the 1991 Gulf War, a story of choking smoke or sickness or of children who ran home after Allied raids with souvenir hunks of bright shining metal from American and British ordnance. Yes, we all know now the story of depleted uranium shells, even if the British and American governments still vehemently deny any link between the possible contamination of Iraq and child cancer deaths, between the use of uranium warheads and the "Gulf War Syndrome" from which US and British veterans now suffer.

But walking the cancer wards, you feel an enormous suspicion that something terrible happened in the last days of the 1991 war.

A British report, I recall, as I take my photographs at each bedside, states how carefully the land is cleaned after depleted uranium shells are test-fired in the Lake District, how projectiles are fired into a tunnel to avoid contamination, how nearby villages are daily checked for radioactivity. But no one has examined the soil of Iraq; nor would anyone want to, for fear of what they might find.

But what is one to make of the words of the mothers and fathers standing by the beds of their dying children? Seven-year-old Youssef Mohamed, a handsome little boy in a blue-and-white pyjama top, has acute leukaemia and his mother, Hassiba, thinks she knows why. "There was a military base near our home in Baghdad," she says. "It was bombed heavily by the Americans, also the local telephone exchange. We felt ill with the choking smoke at the time. I already had a healthy child, born before the war. But when I became pregnant after the war, I had a miscarriage. Then I had Youssef, who has leukaemia, then another miscarriage. Why should this have happened to me? My brother-in-law, Abdul Kadem Moushed, died two years after the war of leukaemia. He had been a soldier; he was only 36. How could my family - which never had a history of cancer - suddenly suffer like this?"

Ashwark Hamid is 13, with acute leukaemia, a quiet, gentle-faced girl in a yellow patterned scarf. She needs a bone marrow transplant, for which there is no hope in Iraq. Her grandmother, Jasmiya, sits on her bed. "We are from Diala in eastern Iraq," she says. "The bombing was very near to us, the airport and the agricultural factory was heavily bombed. We smelled strange fumes, like the smell of gas." What, one wondered, was the agricultural "factory'' making? Pesticides or gas? Or what were the American or British bombs made of?

Oulah Falah is four and has a kidney tumour; her father was a soldier in the 1991 war - there are many rumours in Baghdad that Iraqi veterans are dying in large numbers from cancer - and her mother, Fatin, still shakes her head at her daughter's fate. "Still I am surprised why my child got cancer," she says. A few feet away, Dhamia Qassem is in critical condition after suffering heart failure during treatment for acute leukaemia. She is 13. Mysteriously, her aunt died of cancer only 40 days ago. The aunt was just 36 years old.

Ahmed Walid's case is much more disturbing. He was diagnosed as having chronic myeloid leukaemia three years ago and was only a baby during the bombing of his home town of Diala. But his mother tells a frightening story. "We all smelt the strange fumes after the bombing and then the children round about started bringing in pieces of rockets and shells as souvenirs. They were very bright - a light, bright silver colour - and they played with them in our house."

The stories go on and on, consistent, and undoubtedly true since these often uneducated men and women did not know I was going to visit their children, let alone ask about the 1991 war. Again and again, I hear the same thing.

Tareq Abdullah is 13, again with acute leukaemia. He tells me how neighbours "brought bright pieces of bombs into our home. They were very heavy, like iron". Tareq was diagnosed just a year ago. Karrar Abdel-Emir, the little boy even more frightened of the drugs that may save him than he is of his own leukaemia, comes from Kerbala in southern Iraq. His mother, Ihlass, remembers the bombs falling close to their home. "Some scattered pieces fell nearby. I tried to find them and they were very sharp, like razor blades. I didn't allow the children to touch them in case they cut themselves. There was a very harsh smell; it made our eyes swell."

Rasha Abbas from Basra has leukaemia. She's 15 years old with a fever, declining blood count, mouth lesions and unable to talk. Her father was a fatality in the earlier Iran-Iraq war. "In 1991," her mother Hasna tells me - slowly, wondering what happened to her family - "our own house was bombed. It burned and the explosion ruptured Rasha's ears. Pieces of rocket came right into our house. All the children were running to touch these pieces ."

The mother of little Amna Ahmed, the angel of Babylon, remembers "pieces of a bomb" falling on to their home. "I touched them - we were very interested and they were strange. They were hot pieces - and they had a smell which made us cry." Amna's cousin, Sahera, died of cancer two years ago. She was just 10 months old.

And as I walked on round the wards of the hospital, I went on hearing these stories. What had happened to these children? There is no definite medical explanation for the increase in cancer deaths among children.

So what happened in the last critical weeks of the Allied bombardment? Did we discharge radiation from Iraqi facilities? Did we release chemicals from some of Saddam's dark, Satanic mills? Or did we do something we have yet to admit to - and contaminate the people with radioactivity from our own shells? It sounds an interesting principle on which to run a war: Bomb Now - Die Later.