TWO-YEAR-OLD Moqtada Raed never stood a chance of recovering from the shrapnel wound to his leg. At the Imam Ali hospital in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City last week, he writhed on his thin plastic mattress and whimpered to his father, Ahmad, who knew that nothing could be done to save him.

Moqtada’s thigh had been cut deeply when the family home was struck, apparently by a US rocket, on Tuesday afternoon. He was bleeding profusely.

Eventually his eyes fluttered and began to close, and doctors rushed to his bedside, gently slapping his face to keep him conscious. He died that evening.

The boy was one of the youngest victims of fighting that has killed nearly 1,000 people in Sadr City over the past month.

Hospital officials estimate that of at least 935 who have died, about 700 were civilians. Most were killed by bombs, artillery and sniper fire.

The Iraqi army, backed by American air power and ground forces, is struggling to wrest control of the vast slum of 2m people from the Mahdi Army of the radical Shi’ite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. The offensive has become a trial of strength between al-Sadr and Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

Last week I became the first reporter from Britain to “embed” with the Mahdi Army, studying its preparations for an escalation of the conflict, which threatens security gains made by the American troop surge.

Mahdi commanders said they hoped al-Sadr would authorise an all-out war against the Iraqi government. They claimed their special forces could mount attacks across Iraq, disrupting its security forces and paralysing ministries in a campaign to bring down the prime minister.

Sadr general hospital, which has treated many of the victims, was damaged yesterday amid claims that helicopter gunships had fired three missiles. One of them was said to have destroyed five ambulances. The hospital’s generators were also hit.

At the scene of a missile attack, in which a school, a market and shops had been partly destroyed, photographer Steve Bent and I came under machinegun fire yards from a road crowded with people going to work. Witnesses said the shots came from Iraqi army positions.

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