BAGHDAD: An old man slumbers on a rotten and stinking sofa as a malnourished scruffy child in rags bats around a ball in the dust. Flies buzz through the decay. In Baghdad, the homeless live hand to mouth.

Left with no income after her son was killed in the war, and with her husband old and helpless, Salwa Lifan Salman had to leave her working-class home and move into a squat at the bombed-out Iraqi air force headquarters in the centre of the capital.Her family of 13 — ten of them children — is today crammed into the small room she rents for 50,000 dinars ($40) a month from an alleged landlord who probably has no legal right over the public building.

“He told us he was the owner, that he had bought the ground. We’re frightened he’ll kick us out if we don’t pay,” said Salman, enveloped in the black abaya. She is 43, but already looks like an old woman.

Surrounded by other families in a similar predicament, Salman picks a living amid the ruins left when US warplanes bombed the base in 2003. There is no electricity and only a single tap outside on the pavement for water.

Frightened about being turfed out by the council, she prefers not to create problems. “If we don’t live here, there’s no where else to go,” she said.

Her family is so poor that none of her children goes to school.

“We looked for work but there isn’t any,” she said. In Iraq, where war and insecurity are the primary concerns, reconstruction is limited and funds are short. It goes without saying that her family receives no help from the authorities.

Former builder Faik Hasun, who through illness lost part of his sight in one eye and now needs crutches to get around, also survives hand to mouth, camping out in a workman’s hut in the bombed compound.

Originally from Jadida in northeast Baghdad, he says he left his family in order not to be a burden to them. Today he exists in near total destitution.

From time to time, restaurant or cafeteria workers give him things such as crackers to sell on the street.

“The situation is going from bad to worse. We have never been so badly off,” he said. “Our only chance is if the violence stops and the country recovers some stability. Then there will be a little work.

“Economically things will get better and people like me will have a chance to live a bit better.” Crashing from a thriving economy in the 1970s and

1980s, a third of Iraq’s population of 27 million now lives in poverty, according to a recent study by Iraq’s planning ministry and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).—AFP