New homeless huddle on Iraq’s ‘highway of death’

HUNDREDS of families who lost their homes to post-war rent hikes, are bracing for a freezing winter haunted by the fear of another expulsion from their dilapidated shacks, along Baghdad’s notoriously violent airport road.

“I was thrown out of my apartment after the war. The owners wanted to increase the rent, and I do not have money,” said Um Shawki, 57, who hails from the modest al-Karkh neighbourhood in Baghdad.

With no place to go, she found refuge in a rundown house under construction along the airport road, known by US soldiers as the “highway of death”, for the repeated anti-coalition guerrilla attacks.

“The only place I could find, were these pillars of an unfinished house. With the help of some other homeless people, I was able to put corrugated iron as a rooftop to make the place liveable,” she said, leaning on a wooden cane, and sitting on her porch.

Large families crowd small spaces with no furniture, where men, women, and children sit, eat, and sleep on thin, ragged mats.

Openings in the wall that serve as windows are covered with old, multicoloured sheets, as holes in the roof are traversed by beams of sunlight that crisscross the room. When the rains come, water will soak the living area.

The misery has just started for Um Shawki, and many homeless families who faced a similar ordeal, after the April 9 fall of the Saddam Hussein regime sent rent prices sky-rocketing.

“Every day, we receive visitors with documents claiming that they own the land we are living on. They threaten us with expulsion,” said Jassim Hassan, a 45-year-old construction employee, and a father of six girls, and a boy.

Hassan, who earns 5,000 Iraqi dinars (€2.60) a day, is adamant: “We have been expelled once. Now they can only do it over my dead body.”

“Yesterday it was freezing during the night. We huddled together and used blankets, but it did not help a lot,” said Hussein Ali, 48, while fixing a corrugated iron roof on his small room.

Iraq’s winter season may be short, but temperatures can reach freezing point at night, or in the early hours of morning as people rise for work. The cold is not the only enemy, “We are always afraid of stray bullets. Two days ago we stayed awake counting rockets flying over our heads,” recalls Jassim.