Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad:

United Nations agencies in Iraq have embarked on a desperate drive to “beef up” hundreds of thousands of malnourished toddlers, hoping to enable them to survive a war.

An aid official yesterday said: “The worst-case scenario is that we have only 10 days to finish what is an enormous task.”

The mercy dash, before what many UN staff believe will be their imminent evacuation from the country, follows the leaking of UN assessments that warn of a “humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale and magnitude”.

The “strictly confidential” UN documents, posted on the website of the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq, warn that 30 per cent of Iraqi children under age five would be at risk of death from malnutrition because of likely war damage to the country’s electricity grid and transport systems. Sydney Morning Herald