A worried Iraqi father points at a blister on the face of his one-year-old daughter, the result of a parasitic infection carried by sandflies in her remote village.

“It’s a skin disease, the ‘Baghdad boil’,” Najeh Farhan said of the pustule on Tiba’s mouth as the toddler played with a pacifier at their home in the drought-hit province of Al-Diwaniyah.

Like countless other children in Iraq — a country battling the effects of war, entrenched poverty, water stress and a heating planet — Tiba is sick but has no access to good health care.

“There is no medical centre, we have nothing,” Farhan, a father of seven, said of his small village of Al-Zuweiya.

Tiba has been infected with an illness called cutaneous leishmaniasis, endemic in Iraq for decades.

Read more: france24.com

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