BAGHDAD — American troops have found more than 20 emaciated boys close to death in squalor at a Baghdad orphanage. Staff members at the government-run special-needs home were discovered to be starving the children, some of whom had been tethered to cribs.

Officials had apparently been selling their food at a local market. The chance discovery was made during a daytime patrol in central Baghdad.

An American military advisory team accompanied by Iraqi soldiers looked over a wall and saw what appeared to be corpses. “They saw multiple bodies laying on the floor of the facility,” Staff Sergeant Mitchell Gibson of the 82nd Airborne Division said.

“They thought they were all dead, so they threw a basketball to try and get some attention, and actually one of the kids lifted up his head, tilted it over, and just looked and then went back down. And they said, ‘Oh, they’re alive,’ and so they went into the building.”

Footage broadcast by CBS News showed the extent of the deprivation in the orphanage. Several of the children were covered in their own feces. The children had been kept this way for more than a month, according to the soldiers called in to rescue the dying boys.

“I saw children that you could see literally every bone in their body that were so skinny, they had no energy to move whatsoever, no expression on their face,” Staff Sergeant Michael Beal said.

Another soldier, Lieutenant Stephen Duperre, said, “The kids were tied up, naked, covered in their own waste, and there were three people that were cooking themselves food, but nothing for the kids.”

The soldiers said they found shelves filled with food and new clothes still in their plastic wrapping in the orphanage. Two security guards were arrested under the orders of Prime Minister al-Maliki following the discovery last week.

Other staff members had apparently left the orphanage weeks before. The children have been moved to another orphanage in the city to recover from their ordeal.

[A truck bomb struck a Shiite mosque yesterday in central Baghdad, killing 78 people and wounding more than 200, as about 10,000 American soldiers used heavily armored Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles to battle their way into a Qaeda sanctuary northeast of the capital, the AP reported. The troops, under cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents, the American military said.]