Shia women in black chadors, children in rags, pick through the rubbish piles on the wasteland. All colour has been bleached to a dirty pale grey by the sun, except for the crow-like chadors.
At the periphery of this desolation stand a series of shacks, built from breeze blocks and corrugated steel, arranged in neat rows along unpaved alleys criss-crossed by troughs of frothy green, fetid sewage. This is Dour She'oun, one of Basra's myriad slums.
Sundus Abdel-Kader (33) wants to show me the two little plastic sachets she is bringing home from market: a few spoonfuls of sugar, a handful of flour. "I am going to make cake," she says. "We will have cake and tea for dinner, nothing else. This cost 750 dinars, the most my husband can earn in a day." Sundus has four children. "All of them are hungry. The last time they ate meat was [in January], during [the Muslim holy month of] Ramadan; we got 250 grams of mutton."
Beneath her chador, a white cowl magneh frames Sundus's gentle face. A girl emerges from a crowd of playing children. "This is my daughter Roula," Sundus says. "She is eight years old." Roula smiles with bright eyes, and I tell her mother how pretty she is. Sundus glows with pride, hesitates, then says: "Please, take her with you. Take her to Europe. She will be better off there." Roula is her favourite, healthiest child. "I have two sick children, one has trouble breathing, one is anaemic. We go to the hospitals, and the doctors say there is no medicine."
"No, take my children, please," another woman with a worried face interrupts us. "I have two cripples at home; they need medical care abroad." She shoves a piece of yellowing cardboard before me. Apparently written by a French or Italian doctor in English, it tells how one child died from muscular dystrophy, and two others in the same family now suffer from it.
"When are you going to lift the sanctions?" a third woman butts in, more pleading than angry. "Our children need food and clothes. Please." Al hissar, the sanctions. There is not a single Iraqi who does not know about al hissar. The word means not only "embargo" but "encirclement" and conveys their feeling of being surrounded by a hostile world. Al hissar is an inexhaustible, foolproof excuse for Saddam Hussein. He tells his people that it is the embargo, not him, that starves them.
Basra, the martyred city that was shelled for six years during the 1980-88 war with Iran, feels encircled. Iraq's second city is at the farthest end of the tenuous lifeline from Jordan. With its back against Iran to the east, perched above vengeful Kuwait to the south, Basra is distrusted by Baghdad for being Shia, for having heeded George Bush's call to rise up after the Gulf War.
Lest Basra forget the past 18 years of torment, the bridges and buildings bombed in the Gulf War are there to remind them. So is the central police station, sacked in the 1991 uprising, still gutted; the police have refurbished one small wing of the ugly grey marble husk.
At traffic intersections, policemen parked in shiny new Hyundai cars from Korea keep a close watch on the locals. The cars, allegedly bought in a sanctions-violating oil swap, are bubble-gum pink and lagoon blue-green. The tired, hungry residents of the city do not look at them as they pass on foot or donkey-back, or in buses belching black smoke.
Bronze statues of army "martyrs" of the Iran-Iraq war stand along the bank of the Shatt alArab waterway, pointing to the places in Iran where they died in battle. The plaques put there by the government call it the "Holy Qadissiyeh War".
It is permissible to admit that the invasion of Kuwait was a mistake, but the Iran-Iraq war, in which 1.5 million people died, is still officially holy. All because Saddam Hussein wanted the border with Iran to move a few hundred metres, from the centre of the Shatt Al Arab to its eastern bank. He got what he wanted when Iran sued for peace in 1988, then gave it back in 1990 to secure Iran's neutrality in the 1991 Gulf War.
The denizens of Basra do not speak of these events, but all have understood that when it comes to al hissar, they may vent their frustration. "Of course we are angry with America," Fatima Adel Hassan (33) says.
Like other Iraqi workers, her husband, a car painter, was driven out of Kuwait after it was liberated in 1991. From the outside, Fatima's house in Dour She'oun looks like other slum dwellings, but inside are a washing machine and a decorative carpet, vestiges of the prosperous life the family had as "guest workers" in pre-invasion Kuwait. A portrait of Saddam Hussein hangs on the wall, as it does in most Iraqi homes, loyalty or insurance should the policemen in the shiny cars come calling.
"Now my husband sells sandwiches from a cart," Fatima says. "We have just enough to survive. We don't eat eggs or milk. We can't afford to eat meat."
The husband of Mouna Sebti (28) had a toy shop before the Gulf War. "It's closed now, he cannot afford to buy merchandise," she says. "Sometimes we don't eat. My husband sells cigarettes in the street. That is our only income."
The women of Dour She'oun blame the West for their newfound poverty, and yet they show no animosity. Sahra Sharki (26) holds open the metal door of her cement hovel and begs me to come in. "I'm sorry it is dark inside. The electricity comes every three hours; three hours on, three hours off." Sahra's husband tries to sell the cast-off clothing, furniture and dishes the family finds in rubbish piles. "He used to be a driver, but he sold his car because we needed money. That lasted about a year."
Often there is no running water. "But when there is water from the tap, it looks clean, so we drink it," Sahra continues. She doesn't realise that the sewage just a metre from her front door is leaking into the water pipes. "The main sewage pipe is always blocked," she says. "It's a big problem. The children always have stomach ache and diarrhoea; in fact we all do."
The hulking ruins of Iraq's merchant navy lie a few miles away, in Basra port. Were it not for Saddam Hussein's wars, were it not for the UN embargo, the port would be bustling, and the men of Dour She'oun would have gainful employment.
The guide chosen by the port authority reminds us that it was the British who built these iron gates with their Tudor roses and the long, low colonial style buildings. "We had a British director, John Ward, for 23 years, from 1919 until 1942," Ali al-Imara informs us. There were five British directors before Iraqis took over the port in the 1958 revolution.
Grass grows between the railway sleepers on the quayside. There is not a dock worker to be seen, only stray dogs. The crews still live on their rusting ships, frozen in place by 18 years' accumulation of silt. The Lord Shackleton of Port Stanley is among the 10 ships turning into fossils before us; the trawler was purchased by Iraq before the Falklands War, and its crew call it the Yasmin. Another British ship, the Wisteria, was destroyed in an Iranian artillery bombardment, and is being cut up for scrap metal.
Back at Dour She'oun, the jobless have enrolled in a militia, one of thousands formed around the country since early February "to ward off American aggression". They are supposed to be "volunteers", but in a country where deserters' ears are cut off, where every Iraqi relies on government ration coupons for survival, you wonder how "voluntary" is their service.
As the sun sets over Basra's wasteland, the men march back and forth in khaki uniforms, swinging their Kalashnikovs to the tune of the national anthem, played on a trumpet and a drum.
"Is that gold?" a girl with henna tattoos on her hands asks me, pointing incredulously at my small Claddagh ring. The veinless ivory colour of her eyes betrays a vitamin deficiency. The children show a passing interest in their marching fathers, but when I ask them the words of the national anthem, they shout it in unison, with enthusiasm.
Iraq "clothed itself in the glory of civilisations . . . This land is a flame and a light. It is like a mountain that overlooks the world. We have the anger of the sword and the patience of the Prophet." Then, as night falls, the militiamen head back to their hovels and the children follow, taking care to jump over the sewage-filled ditches.
