In tough Iraqi conflict, civilians pay high price

One sergeant in northern Iraq puts it this way: "If someone runs into a house, we're going to light it up. If civilians get killed in there, that's a tragedy, but we're going to keep doing it and people are going to get the message that they should do whatever they can to keep these people out of their neighborhoods."

There has also been a growing toll of innocent lives in mistaken attacks by US soldiers, including a series of shootings on the nation's roads by US forces that have killed men, women, and children in recent weeks.

"This is no way to live,'' says Salah Hasan, a Baghdad school teacher. "The attacks are getting worse, life is getting worse and what this tells us is that we should take over our own affairs as soon as possible."

The brothers Hasan and Fadel Ali Haider - Fadel is married to Maryam and was hurt in the suicide attack on Sunday - represent the common Iraqi contradiction of gratitude for America's removal of the tyrant Saddam Hussein coupled with anger that their lives seem to be getting more difficult.

On Sunday, they got up shortly after dawn, ate some cold bread and soup with their families and trekked over to their work site through an uncharacteristic Baghdad morning fog.

As usual, their talk drifted to the risks they were taking in pursuing the first steady work they'd had since Baghdad fell to the US last spring, a $5-a-day job clearing twisted steel beams and rubble from a government building destroyed by US missiles at the start of last year's invasion.

Every morning, US soldiers line them up with hundreds of others outside the blast barrier at the Assassin's Gate, a vulnerable bottleneck. The brothers don't work in the compound, but the soldiers made them go through the procedure, concerned that attacks could be mounted on them from their worksite.

As they settled into their hour-long wait in line, Fadel and Hasan's worst fears were realized. Fadel remembers little before waking up in Yarmuk Hospital hours later following successful surgery to remove shrapnel from his head.

Shuddering in pain and still wearing his tattered Adidas track suit, Fadel says he's lucky to be alive. "We always knew that we were a target here. Our families were worried. But money wasn't going to come from anywhere else."

His brother Hasan was even more fortunate. Speaking in a blood-splattered shirt at his brother's bedside, he says he can't believe he was unharmed. "We just have to thank God - it can't be understood." Men to either side of him were killed, rendered unrecognizable by the blast.

He has the 1,000-yard stare of the recently traumatized as he speaks in a monotone about his family's struggles since Hussein's fall. After the war, business for his small tailoring business dried up, and he closed up his shop. His brothers Fadel and Muhsin, who had always worked as laborers, also lost their steady work, just as the monthly rent doubled in the postwar housing shortage.

Three weeks ago, the brothers were delighted to be hired for the demolition job, perhaps not appreciating the irony that such work may eventually move on to the building where they now make their home. Hasan was hoping that it would mean he could send his two teenage sons back to school. They dropped out and have been selling cigarettes on the street to help the family for the past few months.

No one slept last night, including 4-year-old Selman, who doesn't understand what has happened. "Who hurt daddy?' he asks, turning to his mother. "Was it the Americans?"

"How are the poor ever going to get out from under this,'' says Hasan's wife, Awatti, stroking his hair. "We know this wasn't the Americans' fault, what these terrorists did, but they aren't doing enough to help us."

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