Iraq and its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein have been a focus of world attention through the week as the US targets them in the war on terrorism. While the regime has been accused of manipulating the oil for food programme to fund the military, in Baghdad Mary Russell finds people blaming the West for their suffering.

At 2 A.M., the border-crossing between Syria and Iraq is stark: big brutes of lights, trucks with their engines running. In the customs shed, my palmtop computer and camera are examined carefully, though it's the mobile phone that gives me most grief. I should have left it behind in Damascus but word had reached me that there was a shared taxi leaving right away and, fearful of missing it, I had thrown everything into a bag, paid the Syrian middleman US$60 and set off on the 800-kilometre journey to Baghdad.

The phone is wrapped and sealed, leaving only the matter of the compulsory AIDS test: $50 to have it, $60 not to have it. And the baksheesh. One dollar here, 10 there. Tip generously, I'd been told; their wages are abysmally low.

After two and a half hours, we're away, speeding along a smooth, six-lane highway towards a brilliant sun rising over the vast scrub that is the Iraqi desert. And then Baghdad, city of Alif Layla wa Layla - the Thousand and One Nights - and of Haroun al Rashid, who ruled as Caliph in 786.

They called Haroun many things - including Peacock of the World, Shadow of God on Earth - for he was the man who put Baghdad on the map. His marble palace shone white in the moonlight, pink in the sunlight. People he didn't like, he locked up - but during his time, the city prospered. Merchants brought pearls from Arabia, gold dust from Africa, slaves from Turkestan. Baghdad was the greatest city between China and Constantinople.

By 1258, however, the glory was gone - the city sacked by the Mongols. Two hundred years later, Tamerlaine struck. Fast forward to 1921 and Faisal, the Saudi prince - promised Damascus by the colonial powers, but shifted to Baghdad - is on the throne, ruling over a country in which Britain has a huge stake.

Independence erupts and is followed by the boom years with oil the new gold. In the 1970s, there's massive investment in health and education but the eight-year war (1980-1988) with Iran - a war between a secular Arab country and an Islamist one, in which Iraq was supported by the US, the UK and the Gulf States - drains the coffers. In 1990, owing US$12 billion to the Kuwaitis and disputing their common border, drawn up by the European colonial powers, Saddam Hussein launches his invasion, an ill-judged action for which the people of Iraq are now paying dearly.

Dr A.K. Al Hashimi, former Iraqi ambassador to Paris, is a small man, expansive and ebullient. Iraq's troubles are due, according to him, not to Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, but solely to the UN sanctions. "Kuwait," offering me a cup of coffee in his office in Baghdad, "has nothing to do with all this. The UN - and that means the US and the UK - simply wants to control us. We were the second biggest oil producing country, now we are allowed to produce only what the UN says. Everyone wants to trade and we will do business with anyone - except Israel, of course. But New York is sitting on the contracts. The largest number of contracts being held up are for drilling equipment, because, they say, the parts have dual use. But what doesn't? With your pen, you can write a love poem - or an equation for a nuclear weapon."

He is in full flood, figures at his fingertips, passion fuelling his arguments: "The UN wants us to be a democracy." He shakes his head in disbelief: "Like America, with only two parties? People making holes in a bit of paper? Look at us. Are we a police state? Are you stopped by police everywhere you go? No. The sanctions are about collective punishment. We crossed a barrier, a red line, and that's not allowed."

Not only has a terrible hole been made in the Iraqi economy but the people's pride has been wounded, leaving many of them, mainly the wealthy middle-class angry and bitter. The poor, on the other hand, are simply worried to death.

Next day, however, driving out along the highway to see the ancient ruins of Babylon, there are seven checkpoints to negotiate: residents of Baghdad cannot leave the city without the correct papers. Access to the Internet is via the government.

Saddam, who has many fine residences, though no-one knows which one he occupies at any one moment, is rarely seen in public and when he is, his armed aides scan the surrounding area with binoculars.

But there are portraits everywhere of the Great Leader: Saddam suave in a suit, oriental in Arab dress, courageous in army fatigues.

Driving over the bridge known as Leader Bridge, I ask the taxi-driver: "Which leader?"

"There is only one leader," he replies wearily.

Meanwhile, the buses run (red double-deckers, bodies made in China, engines in Germany), there are traffic snarl-ups, people go to work and children to school. But look closer at the traffic. Among the battered cars and taxis - scratches and dents patched over, door-handles missing, windscreens cracked - there are some very smart cars indeed, including Toyota Coasters and sleek, curtained Mercedes.

There's money about. You can see it in the palatial homes and in the opulent mosques being built. Building a mosque is a smart move for a businessman, guaranteeing his next development will go ahead tax-free. Saddam likes to keep both the military and the monied claqsses on-side. On the old racecourse, 10 tall cranes mark the spot where the biggest mosque in the world is being erected - funded by the government.

One evening, I meet Mazeem Sahib, political editor of the government- sponsored Al Juhumuriya. "Before the sanctions," he says, "there were people who disliked Saddam but not now. Since the bombing and the sanctions started, Iraqis have rallied behind him."

"Before the sanctions" is a mantra I hear so often that I write it in shorthand: B4. Before the sanctions, there was free school-milk. Before the sanctions, Iraqis pursued their studies abroad, travelled to Europe, took two holidays a year. Before the sanctions, you could buy a large car for 3,000 dinars. Now, all you'll get is a bunch of plastic flowers. When I changed $10, I was handed a wad of notes thicker than a 300-page book.

The average monthly wage of a government employee is 2,000 dinar and people, desperate for more, subsidise this as best they can. Waiting to go into the press centre - housed in the same building as the Ministry of Information - I watch money change hands as people seek to make appointments with government officials.

Driving to the Saddam Central Children's Hospital, we pass a crowd of men milling about outside the Libyan Embassy. A demonstration, I ask? No, they're queuing for visas. Once in Libya, they can earn money to send back home. Anti-US demonstrations are more orderly, I'm told, because they are organised by the ruling Ba'ath Party.

At the hospital, I meet Dr Ehab Raad. He is short, rotund, curly-headed and when he laughs, his whole body shakes with delight. In Haroun's time, he'd be reclining on a silk-covered divan, sipping wine, being fed grapes by a beautiful dancing girl. But this is Saddam's time and Dr Raad has the task of caring as best he can for the many children suffering from exposure to depleted uranium.

"We're short of everything, even the paper on which to write our prescriptions. It is a crime." He lays his hand on the hairless head of a small, emaciated child. "Some of these children are in remission. When they go into remission for the third time, we stop the chemotherapy." Postponing death is costly. The supply of hospital medicine is limited and when it runs out, parents must buy it privately - if they can. One village mother from the south sold her washing bowl to help to raise the cash.

Dr Raad spent his childhood in Dublin. His mother worked as a doctor in the Rotunda and his father in St Vincent's Hospital. "Tell me, how is Ireland? Gay Byrne, is he still there? I went to school in Saint Benilda's in Kilmacud and I loved it. I love Irish people."

I don't have the heart to tell him that the Irish Government supported the bombing campaign on Afghanistan. Iraqis, after all, expect to be next on the list.

Dr Raad shows me a collection of drawings done by children on his ward. "I get them to draw pictures so that when they die, their parents will have something to remember them by." When they die, not if . . .

On February 13th, 1991, 394 people died in the Al Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad constructed during the Iran/Iraq war. At 4 a.m., a two-ton laser missile, fired from a US F117A Stealth bomber, burst through the re-inforced concrete roof and plunged into the people sleeping in the shelter before blasting its way to the floor below. A second bomb neatly targeted the ventilation system, closing off the air supply so that the temperature inside reached 400 degrees. The guide points out the shape of a hand here, a foot there, the flesh seared into the concrete. A baby, born at midnight, was dead four hours later and next day issued with a death instead of a birth certificate. "This is the result of American terrorism," she says.

The US accused Saddam of using people as a human shield, saying the shelter was really a command post.

What was the floor below used for, I ask the guide. "A hospital, in case anyone in the shelter needed a doctor," she replies. But when I ask can I go down to verify this, she says no, she can't take me down because there are no lights. It is likely that, in fact, the shelter did double as a command centre, though no-one told the local people, so what they thought was a place of safety turned into a deadly incinerator.

The courtyards of the golden-domed mosques are packed with devout Shia women, shrouded in black, picnicking with their children. The Iran-backed Shia - seen as a threat by the Ba'ath Party - live in Saddam City, a huge, working-class complex on the edge of Baghdad where they keep their heads down and concentrate on survival, for the canopied gardens, the sweeping staircases, the pillared mansions of the well-to-do are as remote to the poor of Baghdad as is their seldom-seen leader.

I ask another taxi-driver if the people of Saddam City suffered much in the bombing.

"The people there suffer from everything," he says. He is a Christian and much of is family have already emigrated to the US. Although he doesn't say so, he clearly dislikes the controlling influences of Islam, the fact that Christians are not always welcome in the mosques, the pervasive five-times-a-day call to prayer. As soon as his family send the money, he will take his wife and children to the US.

One day, I take a walk through the old souk, its collapsing balconies and decaying pillared walkways a reminder of the Ottoman occupation. The UN has devised a monthly ration of food which people can buy for 250 dinars and which provides them with 1,800 calories per day. There is no meat, fruit or vegetables in this diet. In the souk, however, the stalls overflow with fresh fruit and vegetables. Since the sanctions, Iraqis have returned to growing their own food and if you have the money, you can buy it. Other stalls are stacked with cheap plastic goods, mostly from China. There have been protests about this. Under the Oil for Food Programme (OFFP), the Chinese have beenimporting Iraqi oil and exporting goods in return. Not a fair exchange. But Dr Hashimi is right: everyone wants to trade with Iraq, especially the Russians who are owed US$15 billion.

Sixty countries are represented in Baghdad. Some can't afford an embassy of their own while others prefer not to be too visible, so diplomacy comes into play with the Algerian embassy hosting the Syrians and the Indian embassy, until last year, hosting Egypt.

Under the OFFP, carefully orchestrated in New York, China has been awarded the contract to provide mobile phones, France will provide land-lines and India will continue to sell rice and wheat. But there is also the Free Trade Agreement whereby countries make their own bilateral arrangements. Syria, Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt fall into this category.

Then there are even more informal arrangements. Turkestan buys Iraqi oil but sells it on, clandestinely, to Turkey, while a number of countries from the former Communist bloc sell their rusty, old weaponry left over from the Soviet era.

But to trade and to rehabilitate itself, Iraq needs hard currency and that can only be earned by selling more oil, which the UN Sanctions Committee controls. It's a no-win situation.

The country, however, is not without friends. India is one of them, lauded because its embassy remained open through the worst of the bombing. The British Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin, George Galloway, is another. His London double-decker bus, emblazoned with its "No sanctions" banner, stands like an icon of hope in the gardens of Mustansiriya, the Arab university that pre-dates Oxford. NGOs such as Voices in the Wilderness - an organisation supported by the former UN humanitarian aid coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday - work tirelessly to keep the issue in the public eye. And UNICEF is there, doing its best under fearful conditions, not least a budget shortfall of 45 per cent.

After 11 years of sanctions, however, Iraqis are bemused. How can it be, they ask, that they are being punished - in the name of democracy - when Israel's bombing and illegal incursions into Palestinian land continue unchecked; when the military regime in Pakistan is now being courted by the US; when Syria, home to at least three militarily- active political parties - aka terrorists - is not being bombed into submission as Iraq now may be.

"The US would like us to have a new leader," says Dr Hashimi, "but Saddam is not running a one-man show. It's a whole system. And we can't give up anything more. If we do, we cease to exist. We must survive."

In the Besan primary school, Baghdad, the children jump to attention when I come in and shout out a greeting: "All praise to our great leader, Saddam. May Allah be merciful to him. Victory to us!" Then they sit down again, three to a desk.

A little girl bursts into tears when I enter her classroom. With my notebook, she thinks I'm the doctor come to give injections; some school health programmes are still in place. The broken windows, pot-holed playground, missing doors, however, remain unmended. And I wonder about money being diverted to build the biggest mosque in the world.

The children are bright and eager, smart in their uniforms. They're learning English, fractions, the Koran. Inevitably, the little boys want to be pilots when they grow up.

Outside in the sunshine, the temperature a cool 37 degrees,, reminders of Baghdad's glorious past are everywhere: the remains of the old Wastani Gate that led out along the camel route to Samarkand; the statue of Abu Nawas, poet and drinking companion of Haroun; the River Tigris, flowing south to join the Euphrates. In the evening, as the sun flames across the water, ropes of coloured lights come on along the embankment and people start to gather, to talk - as Arabs love to do - and to remember what it was like before.

Journeys of a Lifetime by Mary Russell will be published in Ireland in May by Town House and in the UK in July, by Simon and Schuster. Website: www.maryrussell.info.