The death rate for young children in Iraq has almost trebled since 1990 to levels typical of a least-developed country, according to the United Nations children?s fund.

Unicef's 2003 report on the state of the world's children published yesterday shows that Iraq's under-five mortality rate, considered the best single indicator of child welfare, was 133 per 1,000 live births in 2001. This compares with 50 in 1990, just before the Gulf war and the imposition of UN sanctions.

Critics blame the sanctions for plunging Iraq into economic misery after two decades of rising living standards and social progress that saw the under-five mortality rate slashed from 171 in 1960. Only two countries outside Africa - Afghanistan (in fourth place) and Cambodia (30th) - now rank worse than Iraq (33rd) on this indicator.

Unicef data also show that nearly a quarter of babies born in Iraq between 1995 and 2000 were underweight, compared with 7 per cent for neighbouring Iran, and that more than a fifth of young children - close to 1m - had moderate or severe stunting from malnutrition.

Iraq's regression over the past decade is by far the most severe of the 193 countries surveyed. But child mortality has also risen in several southern African countries afflicted by the Aids epidemic, notably Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, where a third or more of the adult population are infected with HIV.

Some poor nations, such as Egypt, Libya, Malaysia and Peru, have made spectacular progress in reducing child mortality in recent years, but many are lagging well behind the UN millennium goal of reducing the rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.

In sub-Saharan Africa, average child mortality rates have fallen by only 4 per cent in the past decade to 173 per 1,000 live births, compared with reductions of a quarter in Asia and a third in Latin America.

Unicef says many nations that have seen big drops in mortality have also achieved ''significant reductions in fertility''.