The embargo has forced many Iraqui businesses and factories to shut down, resulting in massive unemployment. Only government officials have remained in their jobs, their meagre salaries compelling them to work at a second job in the evenings. A pilot, whose income used to be $1000 a month, has no airline to fly for anymore and is selling shoes for 7000 dinars, a mere $3.50 a month. A mechanical engineer has sold all his cars but one, which he drives as a taxi to earn a living. Teachers have had to become cigarette sellers, moneychangers and actors. Many highly qualified Iraquis have left the country.
   Immediately after the sanctions, the Iraqi government started to hand out food baskets to its population, providing the basics for survival. With mounting inflation, the purchasing power of the Iraqi salary was reduced to near zero and these food baskets were vital the people, says the Food and Agricultural Organization in Baghdad.
   Lacking vegetables, fruit and deprived of animal proteins, most people undertake Herculean efforts to find ways of securing enough money or food. Little remains too valuable to be sold. Al-Wakfes, or standing markets, have cropped up in every Iraqi town. People come to them early on Friday mornings to sell belongings from a long- forgotten life. Can-openers, curtain rails, blades, hairbrushes, teaspoons, teddy-bears and even kitchen doors are sold for a pittance. Others, whose personal belongings are thought to be more valuable, try their luck at auction halls filled with lacquered side tables, glossy television sets and pampered chandeliers.
   Even so, Iraq's marketplaces are bustling, its streets crowded with hooting taxis. Shops are filled with fruit and vegetables and pirated versions of Playstation are on sale. Time is undermining the efficacy of the sanctions as more and more items are smuggled across Iraq's borders. For the majority of the population, however, the goods reflect little more a distant dream of what they once could afford to buy.

The damage done during the Gulf War reduced Iraq's infrastructure to rubble. And though all bridges have been repaired - Saddam has his own list of priorities - most of the country remains in a terrible state. Daily powercuts leave the owners of the photographic stores in Baghdad's Sadoun street sitting bored in the dark. Telephone lines seldom work and ten years of isolation has made the internet unheard of for most of the population. There is little availability of clean water while sewage plants remain unrepaired; waterborne diseases such as typhoid and polio, eradicated in Iraq's economic heyday, have now reappearey childrend. Many families are unable to afford bottled water and the tap water causes many young children to suffer from diarrhoea.
   Unicef state that 500 000 children would not have died had Iraq's economic progress continued from the 1980's unimpeded.