Layla al-Attar, an Iraqi painter famous in the Arab world, was killed in the house with her husband when an American Tomahawk missile, aimed at the nearby headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, went astray early last Sunday morning. Hisham, a medical student, was in his bedroom six feet away from Attar’s house when the missile hit. “I am very happy that I am still living,” he says. “Very happy, and very surprised.” But he is afraid there will be another attack soon. He and his friends have seen America’s dangerous side. “Yeah,” says Hydar, a Living in nervous, slightly nerdy engineering student. “When they get bored they shoot another bomb.”
Almost all Iraqis these days share the fear that war will resume-and a certain confusion about why they, rather than the dictator, have to be the victims. “Our spirit has never been so low,” said an older woman in Hisham’s neighborhood. “They didn’t hit Saddam. They only hit some more of us.” The cruise-missile attacks are unnerving. This is the second in six months, and worries that negotiations with U.N. arms inspectors will lead to new attacks cause Iraqis to glance often at the skies. But it is the economic sanctions that take the deepest toll on the Iraqis’ day-to-day lives, while Saddam remains immune. At times he even seems to flaunt his incongruous prosperity. During his birthday celebrations in April, he was seen on TV riding in a golden carriage and digging into an enormous birthday cake-in a country where sugar is almost impossible to find and the sale of desserts, whether the traditional baklava or the modern ice cream, is now legally punishable by death.
Ironically, the sanctions may strengthen Saddam’s hold. The routine of daily survival is so consuming that there is little time left to imagine change, much less to plot it. An average civil servant earns 300 dinars a month-or $4.20 at last week’s black-market exchange rates. Basic government rations will see his family through about 10 days, but for the rest of the month, according to one U.N. report, he must spend more than five times his income. To make ends meet, almost everyone has taken up a second job. At the Foreign Ministry, half the cars in the parking lot are taxis driven by moonlighting functionaries.
And they are the lucky ones. Most of Iraq’s population now live well below the poverty line, trying to sell their last possessions just to survive. In a country where the summer temperature often exceeds 105 degrees Fahrenheit, air conditioners and refrigerators have become expendable for the middleclass. And for the poor-now more than 50 percent of the people-malnutrition is becoming common. Saddam could alleviate much of this suffering if he abided by U.N. resolutions requiring him to sell oil to pay reparations, underwrite U.N. activities and buy relief supplies. His regime refuses, seeing an infringement on Iraqi sovereignty and on Saddam’s control over the country’s resources and people.
_B_Lost missiles:_b_The Iraqis’ deepening confusion about their future is reflected even in the state-controlled press. While one editorial in the government daily Al-Jumhuriya last week lamented the loss of Iraq’s missiles and seemed to suggest it should rearm and threaten retaliation for the Tomahawk attack a “poll” published by the official news agency declared that less than 30 percent of Iraqis favored an attempt to strike at U.S. interests. Meanwhile the government began to soften its line on some disputed aspects of U.N. inspections into its arms industry. Diplomats in Baghdad interpreted such reports as conciliatory, but cautioned, as one put it, that “in this regime there is no easily comprehensible pattern of action and reaction.”
The Iraqi people are left to hold onto their dignity and their dreams as best they can. In the rubble of Layla al-Attar’s home, Hisham Mahir and his friends try to pick up the pieces. They crouch on the sides of the 30-foot crater, chipping mortar off blasted masonry, building a new wall between the house next door and the scene of destruction. “We’re collecting bricks,” says Hydar, the engineering student. “Like they say in America,” he adds hopefully, “we’re just recycling.”
