BAGHDAD: Thirteen-year-old Mohammed Khalaf and his younger brother Ahmed had taken a break from their soccer game to collect candy from American soldiers when a suicide bomber turned his SUV onto the boys’ narrow street.

Tires screeching, the vehicle sped toward the children at the end of the block. In an instant, there was a massive explosion and 28 people were dead. Among them was Ahmed, whose body was ripped open in front of his older brother.

Mohammed hasn’t recovered since that terrible July morning, said his father, Ali Dalil Khalaf, putting a protective arm around the silent boy with large, searching brown eyes.

“What can I tell him?” Khalaf said as he sat with his family on the concrete floor of their small living room.

Mohammed has become another young witness to the daily violence, and his father another adult burdened with loss and the task of explaining new horrors and hatreds to the children of Iraq.

Across the capital, parents, teachers and others now speak of protecting children not just from bombs, but from the war games youngsters play on the streets and the prejudices stoked by the mounting sectarian violence. Adults wish they could heal the psychological scars of growing up in a place where every passing car could be lethal.

“It’s a hard time to be a parent,” said Fawzi Haloob Sahi, who lives across the street from the Khalafs in the largely poor neighbourhood known as Jadida. He lost his 17-year-old son in the bombing and has no money to treat his youngest boy, whose right hand was mangled in the attack.

Raising children in Baghdad hasn’t been easy for a long time. For a dozen years leading up to the 2003 US-led invasion, families struggled to eke out a living as the country buckled under the weight of United Nations sanctions.

Before that, hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis lost their lives in Saddam Hussein’s bloody war with Iran and his invasion of Kuwait.

But since the fall of Hussein 2 1/2 years ago, the bombings, the executions and the rising sectarian tensions have exacted a new toll, many Iraqis say.

“Children are not living their childhood,” said Suat Mohammed, a psychology professor.

“Children are growing afraid to interact with other children. They are afraid of relationships,” Mohammed said. “This generation, when it grows up, will create an unstable, weak society....[They] will curse us for what we have wrought in Iraq.”

At Al Huda School in Karada, a neighbourhood of Baghdad, Principal Najiha Mahdi Mohammed Hadi said she was seeing things she had never seen in her 32 years at the secondary school for girls.

Hadi said students had begun talking about who was a Shia and who was a Sunni. This year, there have been several fights between girls from different religious sects, she said.

“We never thought of distinctions before,” the 60-year-old principal said, shaking her head sadly in her sweltering first-floor office. “This idea just appeared.”

Outside, in a hallway where a group of girls was catching up on chemistry because it was too hot to study in the classrooms, teacher Suad Makiya vented her frustration at the persistent talk among Iraqis about the forces dividing them.

“Why do they always talk of sectarian differences?” she said bitterly, insisting that there were no tensions among her students.

Hadi and other teachers at the dilapidated schoolhouse off one of Baghdad’s main boulevards say they have tried to quash the prejudices by stressing tolerance and unity. The school held several special assemblies to discuss the issue, Hadi said.

“Of course, it is something that breaks my heart,” the tired-looking principal said in between interruptions from cleaning ladies who complained that there was no water to mop the floors.

“But what can I do? I just hope that it will go away with time.”

Across town in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighbourhood, a sprawling slum where mounds of garbage clog unpaved streets and sewage collects in foul-smelling ditches, Salima Juhaie’s family clings to similar hopes.

In August, Juhaie’s 15-year-old daughter was trampled to death in a stampede. Juhaie and three of her other children barely escaped in the panic, sparked by rumours of an impending suicide attack.

Seated on a mat on her living room floor, Juhaie, cloaked in a black abaya, said she couldn’t explain why her daughter died. “It is our fate,” she whispered, her face puffy and red.

Juhaie’s family and neighbours, gathered in the cramped home, said they were determined not to let anyone succeed in their effort to divide Iraqis.

For the children at the little house in Jadida, home to 14 members of the Khalaf family, the world has become a darker, smaller place since Ahmed’s death.

The parents no longer allow the children to go to the store to buy bread. They saved money to buy video games so the children wouldn’t play soccer on the streets. They keep the children away from the markets where vendors sell toy guns and knives.

They don’t have to warn the children to avoid American soldiers. Whenever a convoy passes on the nearby highway, the children flee to a back bedroom.

But Khalaf and the others say they cannot shield their children from everything.

—Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service