This latest Iraq Health and Infrastructure Digest #13 is a compilation of 9 articles covering a wide range of issues facing people in Iraq. Summaries are given as well as the full, or relevant portion of the articles.

Digest by David Smith-Ferri, Voices in the Wilderness

Article Summaries

• Ten doctors killed in Iraq: Unidentified gunmen ambushed a group of doctors on their way to help at hospitals, west of Baghdad, killing 10 of them. [read article]

• Iraqis thirst for water and power: This summer, the third since the fall of Baghdad, has been the worst yet when it comes to basic services. Interruptions to electricity and water supplies - caused by both decay and sabotage - are driving up the frustrations of millions of Iraqis. While last summer public anger was directed at the US government, today it’s as likely to be aimed directly at Iraq’s interim government and officials. [read article]

• New dark age for Iraqi women: women from Basra to Kirkuk are facing a renewed assault on their freedoms as Iraq’s politicians squabble over a new constitution that will at best fudge women’s rights, and at worst hugely undermine them, despite the guarantee of a quota for representation by women in Iraq’s new parliament. [read article]

• Female circumcision: Of 1,554 women and girls over 10 years old interviewed by WADI’s (a German NGO) local medical team, 907, or more than 60 percent, said they had had the operation. The practice is known to exist throughout the Middle East, particularly in northern Saudi Arabia, southern Jordan, and Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest it is present in Syria, western Iran, and southern Turkey. [read article]

• U.N. seeks aid for war-ruined Iraq seed sector: The war in Iraq destroyed the country’s seed industry, putting the country’s domestic food supply at risk, the United Nations food agency said on Monday as it appealed for aid to rebuild farming. Iraq can now cover only 4 percent of its demand for quality seeds. [read article]

• Boys trapped in commercial sex trade: Following the conflict in 2003, there has been an increase in the number of commercial sex workers (CSWs) in the country, especially among teenagers, according to local officials. This increase is attributed to economic pressure faced by families countrywide and the presence of new prostitution rings that have sprung up since the invasion. With society in turmoil and a raft of other serious issues to address, child protection has not been uppermost in the priorities of the transitional government. Gangs use money or threats to get teenage boys to work for them. During Saddam Hussein’s regime, homosexuality was illegal and homosexual practices were punishable by death. “We hope that this will be applied under the new constitution,” said Sheikh Hussein Salah. [read article]

• Insecurity threatens to leave students with late start: “If the situation of insecurity in the country worsens still further and there is a delay in the presentation of the new constitution, we are going to be forced to delay the educational year to guarantee the security of students countrywide, as well as of teachers and other staff,” said Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a senior official in the Ministry of Education. [read article]

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Articles

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10 doctors killed in Iraq

10 Aug 2005

Karbala (SA) - Unidentified gunmen ambushed a group of doctors on their way to help at hospitals, west of Baghdad, killing 10 of them, said medical sources on Wednesday.

The sources said the physicians were travelling to the city of Ramadi when armed men intercepted their vehicle on Tuesday evening.

The sources said among the victims, were Dr Youssef Alewi and two of his assistants from the Karbala health department, in north Iraq.

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Iraqis thirst for water and power

11 Aug 2005 Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Lack of basic services is prompting growing protest aimed at Iraqi officials.

BAGHDAD - This summer, the third since the fall of Baghdad, has been the worst yet when it comes to basic services. Interruptions to electricity and water supplies - caused by both decay and sabotage - are driving up the frustrations of millions of Iraqis.

While last summer public anger was directed at the US government, today it’s as likely to be aimed directly at Iraq’s interim government and officials.

Last Sunday in the Shiite town of Samawa 150 miles south of Baghdad, protests over joblessness and limited electricity and water supplies turned into a riot outside the governor’s office in which about 1,000 residents overturned and burned a police van. The riot ended when police opened fire, killing one.

In a sign of how politically sensitive the matter has become, the rioting saw Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari rush a delegation of representatives to Samawa the next day. At a hastily convened provincial council meeting in their presence, Gov. Muhammed al-Hassani was then sacked.

And here in Baghdad, the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has called for Friday protests against the lack of power and water. This is part of an ongoing campaign to shore up his power base among the urban poor by targeting the failures of his more moderate political opponents, who are now in power.

In a rare statement calling for the protests, Mr. Sadr blamed “the occupier and the people who have traded on their religion and sold their people” for Iraq’s problems, an apparent reference to the mainstream Shiite political parties that run the government.

Meanwhile, Baghdad has a new mayor, Hussein al-Tahhan, who replaced Alaa al-Tamimi after he was run out of office by Shiite militiamen. Mr. Tahhan told Reuters that, “I don’t think a politician should be a mayor, it should be someone who can spend all of his time in the service of the people,” criticizing Mr. Tamimi for not paying enough attention to Baghdad’s already crippled public services.

Iraq’s electricity problems - which in turn lead to frequent pump shutdowns that deprive many neighborhoods of water, and frequently leave pools of sewage decaying in the streets - are a combination of a run-down system, war-time damage, and ongoing insurgent sabotage.

$20 billion for electricity

The US is in the process of spending about $19 billion on long-term water and electricity projects, but about a quarter of this money has been diverted to security because of the raging insurgency, US officials sau. Even when electricity generation is improved at the power plant, transformers and cables are easy insurgent targets, with the net result that less power gets to Iraqi homes.

“Security increases costs by 10 to 25 percent, so we’re not getting our value for money. Security was factored in at a rate of 9 percent - we didn’t know it would be this much,” Brig. Gen. Bill McCoy told Reuters during a tour this week of projects north of Baghdad. “We’ve had to downsize in some areas. It took $3 billion out of water and $500 million out of electricity,” he said.

Iraqi officials said last month that the country would need an estimated $20 billion over the next five years to restore full electric power capacity and keep power flowing to the entire country. Iraqi Electricity Minister Mohsen Shalash seemed confident that Iraq would be able to restore full power within two years and that daily demand - estimated by the US General Accounting Office to reach 8,500 megawatts this summer - will climb to 18,000 megawatts by 2010.

Coping with the heat

But Faten Abed wants reliable electricity and more water now.

Her hair is unwashed and she’s dragging after another sleepless night in her two-room apartment that has been turned into an “oven” by summertime Baghdad’s 115-degree temperatures.

“We turn on the television and all we see is the politicians saying ‘I’m going to do this,’ or ‘I’m going to do that,’ ” she says. “We’ve stopped believing anything they have to say. I had hope before the election that things would be different, but the political parties are losing all of their credibility.”

In some of Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods, like the Sunni-dominated Adhamiya, where gun battles and assassinations are common, even large generators, sometimes owned cooperatively by wealthier neighborhoods, have been targeted.

One Adhamiya resident, who asked not to be named, says his community sold their generators after a death threat from local insurgents.

Mrs. Abed says she’s fortunate to get eight hours electricity of power a day in her cramped home in central Baghdad that she shares with her husband and five children. They live in a ground-floor apartment, so the rooftops where many escape to sleep aren’t an option for them.

Instead, they have rolled up their carpet to sleep on the cooler tile floors, and take turns fanning each other. A cool shower is usually not an option, since the neighborhood’s water is turned off for days at a time. “I don’t want to give up hope completely - maybe the government will start to do something. But for now, we’re hardly sleeping.”

But at least someone is profiting from Baghdad’s decaying infrastructure.

Haider al-Turki grins out from a grease-stained face and shouts to make himself heard over the roar of a portable generator. “I’m making a lot of money thanks to cheap Chinese generators and the terrorists,'’ says the former auto mechanic who switched to fixing generators full-time two years ago. It’s a skill he learned while a conscript in Saddam Hussein’s army.

Sweeping his hand over the jumble of generators spilling from his small workshop onto the sidewalk he says, “I’m the only person I know who’s benefiting from this situation.”

Generating a profit

This summer, Mr. Turki says, he’s repairing about 20 generators every day, up from about 10 a day last summer. He charges about $20 a pop. But even he says he hopes he’ll be out of a job soon.

“I’d be pleased to going back to fixing cars some day - all of my customers are the lucky ones anyway,'’ he says. “Most Iraqis can’t afford a generator, and they’re just trying to live through this.”

Turki says he has a number of friends who have shut small businesses because of intermittent power, and worries that a weak economy will lead to an even less stable Iraq than the one now.

“We have two problems: the terrorists and the government that is stealing from us,” he explains.

He gestures to a tangle of wires hanging from a utility pole outside his shop, which he said exploded about a month ago.

A repairman from the Ministry of Public Works showed up a few days later and then demanded bribes from all of the businessmen on the street to get electricity to the neighborhood up and running again.

“We wouldn’t pay - we’re fed up with this stuff. The Americans can’t fix it and the government is just out for themselves. What did we vote for anyway?”

Electricity and Oil As demand for electricity in Iraq rises in the summer months, the country has continued to suffer chronic distribution problems, even as electricity production increases.

IRAQI ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION:

Prewar 2003: 95,000 megawatt hours/day

June 2005: 100,000 megawatt hours/day

Estimated summertime need: 204,000 megawatt hours/day

December 2005 target: 110,000 megawatt hours/day (revised down from 120,000 megawatt hours/day)

OIL PRODUCTION AND EXPORT

Prewar 2003

Production: 2.6 million barrels per day
Export: 2.1 million barrels per day

May 2005

Production: 2 million barrels per day
Export: 1.4 million barrels per day

December 2005 targets:

Production: 2.8 million barrels per dayExport: 1.8 million barrels per day

Source: The US Government Accounting Office July 2005 Iraqi Reconstruction report —–

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New dark age for Iraqi women

14 Aug 2005 The Observer Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

Earlier this year I was in Iraq’s second city, Basra, lunching with a group of Iraqi women professionals. It was the time of the elections, and the conversation turned to women’s rights. Since the fall of Saddam, the women complained, their freedoms had gradually been eroded, not by official diktat but by groups of Shia radicals who had invaded hospitals, universities and schools, insisting that women wore headscarves and behaved as men saw fit. It was a story I heard again and again across the once cosmopolitan city from middle-class professional women who told me they intended to vote for the secular list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for fear of what would happen if the ‘religious’ Shia list swept to a majority.

It was not to be. Allawi and the largely secular views he represented have lost out to a new sense of religiosity and resurgence of tribal authority that is on the march across Iraq south of Kurdistan.

Now women from Basra to Kirkuk are facing a renewed assault on their freedoms as Iraq’s politicians squabble over a new constitution that will at best fudge women’s rights, and at worst hugely undermine them, despite the guarantee of a quota for representation by women in Iraq’s new parliament.

The principal of equality that existed in what was once one of the Middle East’s most secular countries, and guaranteed women’s rights even in the midst of Saddam’s atrocities, is now under threat in the negotiation of the very constitution that many hoped would guarantee equality. Ironically, it is with the tacit agreement of millions of largely poorly educated Iraqi women.

The major Shia religious parties want to replace the secular civil law that now governs marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance with Sharia law. A draft of the constitution published earlier this month in the newspaper run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq frames sexual equality specifically in terms of ‘the provisions of Islamic Sharia’ rather than Iraq’s civil legal code. Even if, as has been suggested, the new constitution results in a parallel system where women can choose Sharia or the civil code, women’s rights activists fear they may be forced by male relatives to choose a system that is not in their interests.

In a country where the most basic human rights - to life, freedom from intimidation, freedom from torture, a fair judicial process, and freedom of confession - are routinely abused, the issue of women’s rights is low on the agenda, except for those who would proscribe them. Whatever happens over the next few days with the finalisation of a draft constitution, any nods it makes towards equality are likely to be vague, and are unlikely to improve the lot of most Iraqi women.

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Female circumcision surfaces in Iraq

10 Aug 2005 Christian Science Monitor By Nicholas Birch | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

A German aid group finds the first solid proof of the practice, thought to be prevalent in the Middle East.

KIRKUK, IRAQ - Set on an arid plain southeast of Kirkuk, Hasira looks like a place forsaken by time. Sheep amble past mud-brick houses and the odd sickly palm tree shades children’s games. There is no electricity.

Yet along with 39 other villages in this region that Iraq’s Kurds have named Germian (meaning hot place), Hasira and its people have become noted for presenting the first statistical evidence in Iraq of the existence of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation (FGM), as critics call it.

“We knew Germian was one of the areas most affected by the practice,” says Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, director of a German nongovernmental organization called WADI, which has been based in Iraq for more than a decade.

Of 1,554 women and girls over 10 years old interviewed by WADI’s local medical team, 907, or more than 60 percent, said they had had the operation. The practice is known to exist throughout the Middle East, particularly in northern Saudi Arabia, southern Jordan, and Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest it is present in Syria, western Iran, and southern Turkey.

But while this practice was suspected in the region, there was never solid proof that the procedure was so prevalent.

Controversial findings When WADI presented the results of its survey in Vienna this spring, Mr. Osten-Sacken recalls, various Iraqi groups accused the group of being an agent of the Israelis. Even the Iraqi Kurdish authorities, who have backed efforts to combat FGM since the late 1990s, were rattled.

While urban Kurds are generally more lax in religious practice and more Western-looking than most Iraqis - they are the major opponents of sharia for Iraq’s new constitution, for instance - many rural pockets cling to traditions.

“The [Kurdish] Ministry of Human Rights hauled us in for questioning,” says Assi Frooz Aziz, coordinator of WADI’s Germian medical team. “They accused us of publicizing the country’s secrets.”

Secrecy obstructs awareness But it’s not just obstructionism that has held up awareness of the phenomenon. Unlike in parts of Africa, where FGM is practiced relatively openly, in the Middle East it is veiled in secrecy.

“You can’t just walk into a village and ask people if they circumcise their daughters or not,” says Germian social worker Hero Umar. “These people only talked because we’ve been bringing them medical help for over a year.”

Women in Hasira and the surrounding villages are reluctant to talk. But after long negotiation, Trifa Rashid Abdulkerim agrees to answer questions.

A farmer’s wife from the village of Milkhasim, she says she learned the techniques from her neighbor, and took over when she stopped performing the operation. “June is the best time of the year,” she says, “and the best age for patients is between 3 and 8.”

Anti-FGM campaigners point out that FGM crosses religious and ethnic boundaries.

But as a cleric in Sulaymaniyah puts it, “Islamic scholars have complex views on the phenomenon.”

Sitting in his office in the Kurdish city, Mohammed Ahmed Gaznei explains.

“According to the Shafii school, which we Kurds belong to, circumcision is obligatory for both men and women. The Hanbali say it is obligatory only for men.”

Personally opposed to female circumcision, Mr. Gaznei has helped in campaigns to stamp it out.

In 2002, he and other senior Kurdish clerics issued a religious edict, or fatwa, supporting the Hanbali practice. He has since appeared on TV several times to preach against FGM.

In Germian, however, information is slow to filter through the population. Women are still thought to be promiscuous if they are uncircumcised, some people here say.

“They say the food an uncircumcised woman cooks is unclean,” says Shirin Ali, “and that a circumcised girl has more affection for her family.”

WADI workers said that four months ago in a village just north of Hasira, a newly married - and uncircumcised - woman was so badly treated by her in-laws that she performed the operation on herself.

Hero Umar, the social worker, nonetheless thinks attitudes are slowly beginning to change.

“Most imams are cooperative,” she notes. “The biggest obstacle remaining is the older generation of women.”

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U.N. seeks aid for war-ruined Iraq seed sector

8 Aug 2005

ROME, Aug 8 (Reuters) - The war in Iraq destroyed the country’s seed industry, putting the country’s domestic food supply at risk, the United Nations food agency said on Monday as it appealed for aid to rebuild farming.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation said it needed $5.4 million to help the agriculture ministry rebuild a seed industry destroyed by the fighting and looting.

“Iraq had a relatively stable and functioning public-sector-controlled seed industry before the war in 2003. After the war, research and seed production facilities have greatly deteriorated,” FAO said in a statement.

Iraq can now cover only 4 percent of its demand for quality seeds from its own resources.

“Iraq has currently no system in place that provides certified high-quality seeds of improved varieties. As a result, crop productivity remains very low because farmers are using their own, mostly low-quality, seed,” FAO Iraq project manager Tekeste Tekie said.

“If no immediate action is taken, serious seed shortages can be expected in the near future, threatening the country’s food security.”

The FAO project aims to replace buildings and equipment such as tractors and to develop a national seed policy and new seed laws.

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Focus on boys trapped in commercial sex trade

8 Aug 2005

BAGHDAD, 8 August (IRIN) - Hassan Feiraz, a 16-year-old boy, has started a desperate new life since being forced into the sex trade in Baghdad, joining a growing number of adolescents soliciting in Iraq under the threat of street gangs or the force of poverty.

“Every day I cry at night,” Feiraz said. “I’m a homosexual and was forced to work as a prostitute because one of the people I had sex with took pictures of me in bed and said that, if I didn’t work for him, he was going to send the pictures to my family.”

“My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honour,” he said, explaining that homosexuality was totally unacceptable in Iraq due to religious beliefs.

Following the conflict in 2003, there has been an increase in the number of commercial sex workers (CSWs) in the country, especially among teenagers, according to local officials.

This increase is attributed to economic pressure faced by families countrywide and the presence of new prostitution rings that have sprung up since the invasion. With society in turmoil and a raft of other serious issues to address, child protection has not been uppermost in the priorities of the transitional government.

The gangs use money or threats to get teenage boys to work for them, officials said.

“Many of us are working under threat, but others are there because they don’t know how to survive and found it as an easy way of getting money,” Feiraz said. “Someone should help free us from these criminals.”

AN INCREASING PROBLEM

Saeed Muhammad, a senior official in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, said it was addressing the problem but was under-resourced.

“We have been informed about dozens of cases of male prostitution, and all of them [the boys involved] were threatened,” he said. “But we don’t have the capacity to deal with them.”

Muhammad said a special commission had been set up, with help from the Ministry of Interior, to tackle the rings forcing young men into the sex trade.

According to Muhammad, unofficial information suggests there could be as many as 4,000 male commercial sex workers. There are no statistics on the number of boys caught up in the business countrywide, but officials fear that it could be in the hundreds.

Boys are said to receive the equivalent of around US $10 for each person they have sex with, with the gangs reportedly taking five times that amount.

The leader of a ring of commercial sex workers told IRIN that the livelihood they were offering Iraqi boys was “a job like any other”. He insisted that the boys were not threatened and that anyone who came to work for them could leave at any time.

“Iraqis love boys and our work is to offer pleasure to them,” the ring leader, who calls himself Abu Weled (or “father of the boys”), said. “They are all gay and, in Iraq, the homosexual is something cheap and bad, but we make them feel special when working with us.”

Abu Weled’s gang also has some girls under 16 years of age soliciting for him, he said.

HOMOSEXUALS UNDER THE LAW

Under Shari’ah or Islamic law, homosexual practise is a religious crime that carries the death sentence.

The transition constitution in place in Iraq for the past two years does not address homosexuality. A new constitution is currently being drafted.

Whether or not homosexuality it illegal, it is a taboo subject in Iraq and homosexual acts are strongly condemned by Muslims. Yet, these prostitution rings suggest, there is a demand for commercial sex workers to engage in homosexual acts.

Sheikh Hussein Salah, one of the heads of the Shi’ite Muslim community in Iraq, told IRIN in Baghdad that the families of those boys engaged in homosexual practices should “kill them”, whether the situation was forced on them or they entered into it freely.

During Saddam Hussein’s regime, Salah said, homosexuality was illegal and homosexual practices were punishable by death. “We hope that this will be applied under the new constitution,” he added.

Some Baghdadi families said they have stopped their children from going to school or university for fear that they would be lured into the unacceptable trade.

“If I found that my son was doing something like that, I would kill him straight away, because it is an offence to our God and a crime against our honour,” Kudaifa Abdul Lateff, father of three teenagers said. “Homosexuals are nothing more than animals.”

ECONOMIC PUSH TO PROSTITUTION

Rising unemployment, compounded by conflict, has led to the desperate search for money to survive, despite the physical, psychological and health dangers involved in commercial sex work, local officials say.

According to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation released in April, 48 percent of youths in the country are unemployed, most of them discouraged by poor salaries in those jobs that are available.

“We are a poor family and my husband cannot work because he has serious epilepsy,” Um Zacarias, a mother of two child sex workers, said. “Three months ago, Abu Weled came to our house offering us money if we let our two teenage [aged 13 and 14] boys work with them.

“Thanks to him, today we have a good income. People may find it surprising, but at least we can eat now and I’m proud of them.”

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

The Ministry of Interior, after an appeal by the Ministry of Labour, has started a new commission to search for the ring leaders and tackle families sending their children into the sex trade.

A senior interior ministry official, who preferred to remain anonymous for his own security, said that leaders of two gangs in Baghdad had been captured so far.

More than 15 boys were also being questioned, he said. Their families had not been given the real reason for their detention, in case they responded with threats or violence to the boys.

“When you hear what the teenagers have been through, you really fear for your own children,” the ministry official said. “They could fall victim any minute to these heartless gangs.”

The Ministry of Labour has also developed a programme, focusing on non-judgemental psychological counselling, to rehabilitate boys who want to return to a normal life without suffering social discrimination.

RESCUE EFFORTS

Based on information supplied by the Ministry of Labour, two small local NGOs are trying to help the child sex workers. On of them, Iraqi Peace and Better Future (IPBF), has collected the names of more than 50 teenage boys who say they cannot leave the trade because of threats. Few cases have been resolved, however.

“We have been trying to do our best in taking those unlucky boys and girls from the streets of the capital,” said Abdallah Jassim, spokesman for IPBF. “But sometimes we are stopped by the gangs, who threaten us. And the government cannot offer us special security on a daily basis.”

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) is also waiting for approval and funding for a proposed rehabilitation project for teenagers, it said. So far it has had few donors.

Meanwhile, with few positive prospects in sight, many boys in Baghdad are living in fear, urging that someone, somewhere come up with a solution to their plight.

“I hope that one day I will live without the fear that I may find my father with a gun or a knife ready to kill me because he has discovered what I do for a living,” said Youssef Hatab, a 15 year-old boy.

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Insecurity threatens to leave students with late start

10 Aug 2005

BAGHDAD, 10 August (IRIN) - The start of the academic year for schools and universities in Iraq could be delayed by widespread insecurity, especially if a surge in terrorist attacks derails or delays the constitutional drafting process, according to local government officials.

“If the situation of insecurity in the country worsens still further and there is a delay in the presentation of the new constitution, we are going to be forced to delay the educational year to guarantee the security of students countrywide, as well as of teachers and other staff,” said Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a senior official in the Ministry of Education.

The draft constitution is due to be completed on 15 August, after which it is to be referred to the National Assembly for debate.

A deteriorating security situation in Iraq has caused parents to fear for students going to school, and also increased teachers’ concern for their own safety, according to Abdul Rahman.

“Each day, more attacks are happening [somewhere] in the country,” Abdul Rahman said.

“The capital, Baghdad, has been one of the most affected areas in Iraq and, last year, the quality of our education decreased shockingly,” he added. “We may not have any other choice than to delay the current academic year in schools.”

The school year is due to start on 11 September but may have to be postponed to the end of October, local officials suggested. By then, they hope, tensions around the constitutional transition and the insecurity currently prevailing may have eased.

“The drafting of the constitution has brought an increase in insurgency attacks and disorganisation around security issues in Iraq,” said Zacarias al-Fardi, a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior.

“Differences from local senior officials’ opinions - those responsible for its writing - have elevated the disorder and terrorism attacks,” he said.

Al-Fardi said the ministry is taking all the measures it can to prevent generalised insecurity being a reason to postpone the return to school, but that the problem lay not only in its hands since insecurity is a key problem for the government and country as a whole.

Meanwhile, Iraqis suffer the ill effects of an education system under severe pressure and with declining standards.

Suheyla Hussein, 34, a Baghdad resident, complained that the combination of insecurity and educational decline was not new, and said that her children had not learned anything new in the last year.

“My daughter has passed to a new school degree,” she said, “but I can guarantee that she has not learned anything new - just few subjects, which were incomplete and without meaning,” she said.

Abdul Rahman suggested that the reason for such a bad year in education was that most teachers were afraid to stay long hours in schools, and try to finish their lessons as early as possible to get off the streets to the relative safety of their homes.

The families of many students with the means to do so have now started to search for ways to have their children educated outside Iraq - in Jordan or Syria, for instance - despite the expense involved, according to local observers.

“My husband went to Jordan searching for a possibility of getting a place for our children in their schools,” Suaad Munir, a mother of four, told IRIN in Baghdad, “because if this year continues like last year, they are not going to learn anything.

“They had more holidays and days off than days in school, learning.”