Sura wanted me to meet her friend, Hassan, one of the guards at the hospital she works in. On December 8th about 11pm he was asleep, off duty, in the guard room at the entrance to Abu Ghraib hospital. A car arrived with a patient inside and his colleague went out to search the car, because all vehicles entering the hospital have to be searched.

A Humvee of US soldiers came and started shooting at random with the gun on top of the vehicle. They all ran back into the guard room. His two friends were injured by glass from the window. A bullet hit Hassan in his abdomen. Another went through the window of the delivery room while women were giving birth in there.

Just before Hassan went into the operating theatre, the commander, a Major whose name I couldn’t quite understand, maybe Major Pavel, something like that, came and told him he was sorry. It was a mistake. Oops. Hassan’s had two operations in the 12 days since then, to cut away the infected tissue. He shuffled, with help, from the corridor back to his bed. It took two men to help him sit because he can’t bend at the waist. Holding his clothing away from the ghastly mess of his belly, he told me he’d heard that the soldiers suspected something so they started shooting.

A friend filled in the compensation claim forms on his behalf but as yet they’ve heard nothing. The problem is, he’s married with 2 kids. His mother is also dependent on him, as are some of his siblings. His 37 year old sister has breast cancer, which appeared in May. She has epilepsy, which was aggravated by the chemotherapy, so now she’s having no treatment for the cancer.

By coincidence, as we arrived at the hospital, the group of men we saw on Thursday was carrying a coffin away. It was the man who came in with a gunshot wound, the man who was shouting, gasping, groaning. He died at 4am on Friday. He’d been selected as the head of an interim council for a district within Abu Ghraib. I don’t know which area and I don’t know who shot him.

We stopped in at Hekmet’s house. They got married 2 months ago. He was married before and has a son, but she never has. The last time I was at their house he was campaigning on her to go and do her hair and dress up so I could take a photo of her, because he liked the ones I took of the local kids the other day. “don’t you think my wife is beautiful,” he kept saying. “Take her photo.”

“Moretania,” she kept saying – another time. Stop going on. Kiss me, he said, and make me forget about it. Khadije knelt over him, lifted his head, kissed him on each cheek and then bit his nose. So today we did the photos. He calls her Hokha for short. We had a small adventure trying to work out what kind of fruit that is in English. An apricot? No, bigger. Hairy. Ah, a peach. Bitch? No, no, don’t call her that.

Zakia Ibrahim is 62, a woman in an abaya, contour lines on her face mapping her life, a huge mole under one eye, surrounded by grandchildren. There are 23 grandchildren from her fice sons, still more from the six daughters. “I was harvesting wheat in my village when my first son was born. I cut the cord with something I had with me and carried on working, not like women today, lying on their backs for days.” It was 1958 and she was seventeen, already three years married.

They kept sheep, cows and donkeys. In those days you could live wherever you pleased and you went wherever there was land that you could use. “But when the King came [in 1958], people were taken to places like Thawra, Sadr, places where there were authorities.” Boys and girls used to swim together in the villages, not like now, she said, when they are all separated. In 1963, when Iraq changed from monarchy to republic and urbanisation increased, those things started to change as well.

Her husband was 13 years older. “We used to be afraid we would be beaten by our husbands. We were not allowed to wear make up. I was married in a small hut. When you looked up at the ceiling you saw the sky. We had no car - they took me to my husband’s house on the back of a donkey and I sat on a tin can at my wedding. But then at least we had animals to raise for food, for eggs and milk. Now we have not even an egg. There is no gas, no petrol, no electricity.

“The Americans promised us first aid and humanitarian assistance but they have given nothing. Under the sanctions we would eat whatever we could – there was no variety. We couldn’t even change our clothes. Under Saddam and the sanctions it was the same as now under Bush. It is not a pleasant life.”

Of Saddam’s arrest, she says it was fate. It was written. He was caught because it was meant to be. “Under Saddam, we could not even open our mouths.” But still she has sympathy for him: “He has Moslem blood.” Her son was jailed for a year for avoiding the army. He was paying money to an officer to overlook his non-appearance so he could carry on earning money for his family. He was beaten and tortured in jail, in 2000. “They did not give them food. They were treated like dogs, herded, and I used to tell him, remember, they are Moslems like you.”

She was allowed a two hour visit every three weeks, which meant a whole day traveling to get to Mosul, because he was jailed where his unit was based. “But at least under Saddam we had security. I could travel back from Mosul after dark but now we can’t go anywhere. I told my sons’ wives not to get pregnant because if the birth started at night we could not even take them to the hospital.”

Two of her sons were conscripted into the war with Iran. One was injured. “No one could say he wouldn’t go. He would be executed in front of his family. The year you went in depended on the year you were born and then you stayed until the end, your end or the war’s end. There was always food then. It was good living but so many men died. There were always big funerals for the men who were killed.”

Things were better then, she said, because of the nationalisation of the oil industry. “We had opportunities, better jobs, a higher standard of living.” Chuckling to herself, she told us how two ladies once asked her about the standard of living now. I don’t even have money for the hairdresser, she told them. “At my age,” she said with glee. “As if I still go to the hairdresser.”

Another son was called up for the 1991 war but went into hiding. “He hid here, beside me,” Zakia laughed. “So many wars. It’s amazing we still have flesh and blood on us.” They left Abu Ghraib when the US soldiers entered the airport, taking the kids to the tribal leaders nearby and distributing them around the homes. She and some of the others stayed in the house until things got really bad: “It was like fire on top of our heads.”

Fadhil, her sixteen year old grandson, was shot dead by US troops firing from a helicopter when he went to the roof to call the younger kids indoors while they were cleaning up the house after the war. “Lots of people died in Iraq. It would have been better to lose the house or have everything looted. It is better to die than to live like this, to live with deaths every day.”

Two of her sons now support the extended family. Her youngest son is 21, married for three years with a child. He worked in one of the palaces, earning good money. Now there’s no money. “If I could I would work and let him sit, because he’s still only a child.” We appointed Zakia the president. First, she said, she would bring law and order and then she would give to the poor. “The rich already have thick bones. I have suffered with the poor. I met a woman who had never even tasted dates. Imagine that, in Iraq, where we grow the best dates in the world.”

And then we had to go because it was half past four and the ground was already rocking with sporadic explosions and the air thudding with helicopters so low you could almost flick mud at them and by dark, they say, Abu Ghraib is a war zone, and Aala, Abbas, Yousef, Yaseen, Abdelqader, Afra’, Adhra’, Mabreen, Noor, Amer, Shibreen, Meruh, Rusha, Mustafa, Hussein, Shahet, Amer, Sareh, Hadih, Tabarek and the rest danced after us to the car, between the swamps and the rubbish and the ducks and geese and cockerels poking about in them.