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.