SHATTERED DREAMS OF 'LIBERATED' IRAQI WAR DIARY GIRL: The Americans

IRAQI teenager Thuraya el-Kaissi and her family celebrated the toppling of Saddam Hussein when Britain and America won the war eight months ago.

Freedom beckoned for Thuraya, 18, whose war diary in the Sunday Mirror came to symbolise the aspirations of millions of ordinary Iraqis.

So, you might have thought Thuraya would have welcomed the capture of the Iraqi dictator at his hideout 13 days ago.

But not a bit of it. The dreams that were born with the ending of tyranny in Iraq have long since died.

Thuraya says: "I am sad the Americans have taken Saddam from us. Before the war I never liked him because there was so much we never had. But now he has gone and the occupiers are here we have so much less - except killings and troubles."

Her words are simple and honest...but also shocking. For Thuraya's hatred of the American invaders has now reached the point where she is considering joining the armed resistance - perhaps even becoming a suicide bomber.

Far from the end of the war signalling freedom and the end of repression, it has brought a life of more struggle and shattered hopes.

At the height of the bombing of Baghdad Thuraya dared to dream of a new life - of having freedom to visit London and walk through the streets to see places of which she had only read about in books given to her by her parents, who spent many years in Britain.

"I dreamed of going to college in England and learning the English language because I love it," she said. "I dreamed of speaking to so many people in England to improve my speech.

"I dreamed of seeing my country happy again and watching people smile because their lives were better than before. I dreamed also a little of how we would get new shops and clothes for young people and how we could live normal lives."

Thuraya can no longer remember those moments when she wished for the new future. Now she is an angry young woman, filled with a burning hatred for every American soldier she sees in her city.

"When I see them before me I want to kill them," she admits. As she sits speaking of such anger, her parents, mother Inan Younis El- Izzi and lecturer father Faiq, an Essex University graduate, nod approvingly.

"I want to place a bomb in the middle of them, I want to know how many of them I can kill," she says. "Such is my hatred of all things American. All my friends feel the same. We want to join the armed resistance to fight for our country and for our dignity.

"We all see the Americans as occupiers who treat us as dogs."

Thuraya recounts her feelings as she sits in the darkened kitchen of her family home in the Baghdad suburb of Al-Adhamiya. A single battery light casts eerie shadows on the wall. The electricity has been off for at least four hours and it is uncertain when it will return.

"This is just part of the indignity of how they treat Iraqi people. They came with words of liberation and took away our telephones. They cut our electricity - some days we have none and when I return from school at night I cannot read my school books.

"They steal our oil and we have no petrol. This is madness - a greedy craziness in our country - because everywhere under our ground there is petrol. We had so much of it before the Americans came here. Today my brother queued for petrol for our car. It took him nine hours of waiting. The line was three miles long. How can this be?"

A tear falls from Thuraya's face when she speaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein.

"I believed he was leading the resistance and he had become my hero. When I heard they had taken him I asked my father to tell me it was not true - that this was another American lie. In my school girls were crying and we didn't want to believe this news. All of us were very upset."

The dramatic change in Thuraya is one reflected by so many people in Baghdad, where the problems of lack of security and basic amenities are a constant reminder of the lack of Coalition post-war strategic planning in Iraq. Thuraya scoffs at suggestions that there are many more consumer goods for sale on the streets of Baghdad today than before the war - mainly satellite TVs. She raises her voice: "Television and satellite - is this all the Americans are going to bring us to keep us happy? They treat us with contempt, they do not have respect for us and they think these things will make us happy. They do not understand we were a civilised country long before they were even invented." To listen to such nostalgia for Saddam from ateenager whose family are well- educated is an indictment of the chaos that has been allowed to develop in Iraq. However unrealistic Thuraya's post- war dreams might have been, her sentiments now run through much of Baghdad society. It is not just a perception that life now is more difficult, it is a reality and the blame for it has been placed squarely on the shoulders of the Coalition by Iraqis. Thuraya adds: "I did not hate the Americans before the war and I think I remember hoping they would bring us happiness because they said they would liberate us. But they have not. I am now 18, but I feel sometimes like an old woman because I am nothappy. I have stopped smiling and I do not have happy times with my friends. "Now all we speak of is the problems, the killings, the bombs and Bush and Blair and how they do not understand Iraqis. "Yesterday I saw an American soldier in the street shouting in English at an ordinary Iraqi man who could not understand what the American was telling him. The soldier just kept shouting louder and louder as if that was a way to make the man understand. "I wanted to cry, for this man and for my country, it was humiliating. I wanted to stop the soldier and ask him how he thought he had the right totreat this man in such a way. This is our country and it is supposed to be our freedom." Thuraya has heard about the mass graves discovered around various parts of Iraq - of Saddam's victims from years of brutal violence. But she refuses to believe they are all the victims of her former President. "I don't think these are all from Saddam. There are many bodies killed by many people - by Iranians and Kurdish. All sorts who fought with us over many years. I don't believe all I hear about these places." At Thuraya's school, there is a feeling that it is only a matter of time before they become victims of the unending rounds of terrorist bombs.Right next door to the school is a local police station, one of the main targets for bombers trying to kill those considered to be collaborators with the Coalition forces. Thuraya says:"Each day our teacher tells us to be careful because one day there will be a bomb at the police station and we might get hurt. "We leave open the windows of our school in case they break. "But if it happens I will not blame the resistance, I will blame the Americans because they have caused this. "I do not feel safe any more."

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