Iraq marks Gulf War in fresh fear

Iraq is on Friday marking the 12th anniversary of the US-led air attacks that started the Gulf War of 1991.

" Last time, people still had regular financial means to support themselves - that's no longer the case "
Red Cross spokesman

Saddam Hussein is expected to deliver a speech on the occasion, as Iraqis prepare for the possibility of another American-led attack.

Twelve years on, aid workers are anxious about how another American-led war would affect Iraq's largely impoverished civilians.

Red Cross spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin says ordinary Iraqis are much more vulnerable now because of more than a decade of sanctions which have left the majority of them dependent on government food rations.

"Iraq used to be an affluent country," Mr Huguenin-Benjamin told the BBC. "Last time, people still had regular financial means to support themselves. That's no longer the case."

He described the residents of Baghdad as living in "a kind of psychological terror" in recent months.

"Families don't know whether they should send their children to relatives in the countryside. People living in high buildings are worried. Everyone is concerned."

Nightmare

One Baghdad resident says he remembers the war launched after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as a nightmare.

Because power stations were bombed, there was no electricity and soon no water in the taps either as Iraqi pumping stations and water treatment plants virtually stopped functioning.

Streets were awash in sewage.

Many people in what was then a sophisticated city were reduced to drinking water from the River Tigris.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch this week said if there was a war everything possible must be done to avoid civilian casualties.

In Baghdad itself, a procession of peace activists has been visiting the Al-Amariyah bomb shelter which was bombed in February 1991.

Iraq says over 400 people died there, most of them women and children.