In Iraq, a winter of discontent

Haider Ali, a greengrocer in central Baghdad, says business has been awful this year. Farm prices have surged as supplies of subsidized fuel for tractors and transport have vanished. "We complain to the farmers, but they say they have no choice. My best customers used to come every day. Now I'm lucky to see them once a week."

Mr. Ali says his income has been cut in half, to about $200 a month. In the summer, he would drive to a wholesale market on the outskirts of Baghdad before dawn, but now bandits and kidnappers have made that too dangerous. "I get started after 7 now,'' he says. "The risks are just too great."

It's hard to find an Iraqi family that hasn't been touched in some way by the war and its aftermath.

To make matters worse, families have been given new cause for worry after the US military unintentionally dropped a 500-pound bomb on a house in a northern Iraq village on Saturday, killing at least five.

The Farhut family was turned upside down by the US invasion.

Sabah Farhut, a father of 10 between the ages of 3 and 21, owned an old municipal bus that plied Baghdad's roads. Parked in Dora, a Sunni neighborhood that saw fierce fighting as the US entered Baghdad, the bus was destroyed. Soon after the rent on the family home in the city's Bayaa neighborhood tripled, the Farhuts became squatters.

Yet compared with many in this city, they're well off. Since April of 2003 they have been living on the banks of the Tigris in a former social club owned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday. Their home, once an open stand used to sell grilled meat, has a concrete floor and walls on the three sides.

Zainuba Farhut, the family matriarch, says they haven't been able to buy kerosene for their heater for weeks. They have a small electric heater but with electricity on for only two hours then off for four, it doesn't do much good. "We just all sleep in this room together and heap on as many blankets as we can,'' she says.

Now her husband works as a day laborer when he can. This week, he got a job delivering a car to Iraq's southernmost city of Basra, a trip that takes him over the dangerous roads just south of the capitol, where dozens have been killed and kidnapped in recent weeks.

"We're living on about 5,000 [$2.80] dinars a day right now,'' she says. "We don't eat meat or fish anymore, but it's good for him to have work. He hasn't found a construction job for weeks - we heard that material prices have risen because the roads are so bad."

Despite the tough times, there's little bitterness in her voice as she tells her story, offering glasses of orange drink to her guests and praising the American invasion of Iraq. "To this day we are grateful for the American soldiers; they rid of us Saddam. It's just that now we have to face terrorists and bombs."

She and her husband are planning on voting in the Jan. 30 election, but it comes as news to her that the interim parliament's primary job will be to write a new constitution for Iraq. "I think their priority should be security. This is what the people want."

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