AMMAN, Feb 1 (AFP) - A seven-year-old Iraqi cancer patient who symbolises the sufferings of Iraqis under UN sanctions is doomed to a life in darkness despite treatment in the United States for the leukemia that caused her blindness. Maryam Hamza will leave the United States for Jordan on Friday on her way back to Iraq, a statement by the Bruderhof Communities, a US non-governmental group campaigning for a lifting of the UN sanctions, said Thursday.

The group invited Maryam to the United States in August for medical treatment and she was examined by four eye specialists.

"Her eyes were carefully evaluated and it was determined that she had suffered damage to the macular area of her retinas, the optic nerve and the center of sight in her brain," the statement said.

"There is no hope for her eyesight to be restored. Maryam has been condemned to live in darkness because of the cruel and criminal sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United States through the United Nations," it said.

"Because the sanctions prohibit the importation by Iraq of the parts necessary to maintain the equipment used to determine correct dosages for treating leukemia patients, it is very difficult for doctors to administer the medicines required to successfully treat leukemia," the statement said. "As a result Maryam, an innocent child, became blind," it added.

The United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The United States, which led an international coalition in the 1991 Gulf War to liberate the emirate, spearheads the embargo. The Iraqi health ministry said in January that the UN embargo had caused more than 1.3 million deaths over ten years, with the incidence of leukemia up 17 percent.

Maryam, accompanied by her grandmother and members of the Bruderhof Communities, arrives Saturday in Amman aboard a Royal Jordanian flight and will go on to Iraq Tuesday after a six-month stay in a Pennsylvania hospital.

The Jordanian national carrier offered the child and her grandmother the round-trip ticket while the US embassy in Amman helped the pair obtain the necessary visas to enter the United States in August. Maryam was blinded by leukemia in 1999 and suffers from a defective nervous system.

She was spotted in a Baghdad hospital by British MP George Galloway who arranged for her to travel to Britain for treatment, but despite initial signs of improvement she suffered a relapse and was hospitalised again in October 1999 in an Amman cancer clinic.

Galloway, a maverick member of Britain's governing Labour party, used the girl's name for the Maryam Appeal Campaign he established to draw international attention to the health situation in Iraq.