BAGHDAD — Looking down as he walked toward home through a scrubby field on the edge of Baghdad, 11-year-old Amer Mahmoud spotted the small, reddish-brown cylinder on the ground just as his foot touched it.
The bomblet exploded, leaving his left leg hanging by bloody shreds. He woke up hours later in a hospital, after an emergency amputation of his leg just below the knee.
"Everything in my life has changed," said Amer, a brown-eyed boy so small and slight he looked closer to 7 or 8. He spoke in a halting whisper from his cot in crowded, chaotic Al Noor hospital in northern Baghdad on Monday, a day after the explosion. "I cannot see now what my future will be."
Nearly two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqis are still being killed and maimed daily by previously unexploded ordnance in their cities and towns -- much of it in the form of cluster munitions, a class of weapons whose use has been denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, particularly children.
At a Pentagon briefing on Monday, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had "not heard of injuries" from cluster bombs but could not say whether such bombs had been used in residential areas. Another Pentagon official confirmed that cluster bombs were used in Iraq but could not say whether they were used in Baghdad.
Cluster munitions are designed to break up in the air and scatter bomblets over a wide area, and critics say they have a high failure rate that renders them a hazard for months or even years to come.
"They're like land mines that floated through the air," said Dr. Geert Van Moorter, who works with a Belgian medical charity in Iraq.
American military officials have asserted that such munitions are legal and serve legitimate military purposes.
Though cluster bombs are not specifically prohibited under existing treaties and conventions, advocates of a ban argue that they meet the criteria for weapons whose use runs counter to generally accepted humanitarian standards.
"You can't use a weapon that is indiscriminate by nature, and you have to distinguish between civilian and military targets," said Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group that issued a statement this month denouncing the reported use of cluster munitions in civilian areas. "We think if you use these things in neighborhoods, you may well run afoul of international law."
