Her children play in the street, which is covered in garbage and has an open sewage ditch running down the side. Her husband works for the Baghdad sewage system and makes the equivalent of five dollars per month. In 1990, fewer than a thousand people lived in Al Tarek. Now there are more than 30,000 living in sloppily built homes of bricks, mud and concrete blocks. There is no sewage system.
Trucks sometimes come and remove the solid waste from the homes.
Ditches of urine and other liquid waste line nearly every street where barefoot children play. A huge disused canal full of toxic water and raw sewage sits between Al Tarek and Saddam City. The water in Al Tarek, residents said, is frequently smelly, cloudy and, as Abed said, full of worms. It's so bad that sometimes Al Tarek people fetch water from the main parts of Saddam City, itself an impoverished mini-city where herds of goats chew at piles of garbage in the street. The government promised a sewage system but when the war started none came.