UZMA BASHIR has been in Iraq for the majority of the past year where she originally travelled as a Human shield. She is now helping to set up a refuge for homeless children in Baghdad. Here is her account of daily life there.

Anyone who stands in the way of American interests here will be arrested- proclaims a US Soldier at secondary school, while arresting 16 boys for holding a non-violent demonstration.

There has been so much going on it is exhausting to attempt to keep up with it all at times.

The petrol situation continues to be at the forefront of the problems.

Although it feels silly to write even that-gas being the main problem, when on a daily basis Iraqi homes are being raided by US soldiers, roadside bombs are blowing up civilians and soldiers alike, the Iraqi state has completely collapsed, food and fuel prices rise daily, unemployment is over 60% and growing, and 80% of Baghdad has 12 hours of electricity per day, at best.

But, the gas shortage affects everyone. The petrol lines are sometimes 3 miles long, the US has started rationing now-odd number plates one day, even the next, 30 liters per tank. That's it. With 30 liters you can't go far not even to most of the other major cities in Iraq.

"They want us as their slaves here! How can you live your life if you can't move? How can you heat your home without electricity? Without oil to warm yourself with your heater? Why are they doing this?" says one man.

A man named Rahan sitting in his car in a petrol line is furious. "Do you see my family with me here? No! I am either sitting in gas lines, or I am driving my car as a taxi for 8 hours to try to make enough Dinars to feed my family. I'm tired and very angry. I can't take this much longer! How long do they think we will live like this before all of us are in the resistance against them?"

The black market prices have gone completely out of control, this sky-rocketing augmented by the fact that the CPA has issued threats that anyone caught selling fuel illegally will be jailed for 3-10 years.

Baha who works at a hotel in Baghdad tells me, "If I leave my job to fill my car I don't get paid. I need gas to get to work. I can't get the gas. How do I get to work? How do I feed my family?"

He tells me that the only way he can make it is to buy black market. There is no way he can wait in the lines overnight, as he has to take his son to school at 8am each morning.

"If I miss a day of work here, they don't pay me for four days of work. Not just the one day I miss, but four days with no pay."

I ask him, naively, if that is standard practice in Iraq.

"I don't know about Iraq, but this is what they do here, at this place. There is no government to control anything, so they can do what they want to the workers.

I visited the Italian Red Cross Field Hospital burn unit. Since many Iraqi families can ill afford the high prices of petrol to use as cooking fuel and to heat their homes, they have been forced to use cheaper, more dangerous fuels and heating methods in their homes.

The director of the field hospital, Mauro Tondolo, informed me there has been a 300% increase in burn victims due to accidents caused in homes by these dangerous situations, the direct result from lack of electricity and expensive petrol.

A heartbreaking example is 6 year old Ali Bashir, burned when his home caught on fire by a dysfunctional old electric heater which ignited during the day when the electricity came back on after being cut for several days. The parents were out of the home, and the oldest child saved the two other babies, but was unable to rescue Ali who suffered burns over 30% of his body, including his entire head.

I continually wonder how the US run CPA can morally justify shipping one drop of Iraqi gasoline out of the country, with the situation here as bad as it is, and degrading daily. Of course I am fully aware that the answer has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with money. But then, that is how we got here in the first place.

We went back to the school where the First Armored Division took school kids prisoner. Turns out they took 16 kids, but we learned the demonstration the day before wasn't violent, in that the kids didn't even throw rocks.

Ahmed, an English teacher there, told me he walked through the school with the soldiers as they were going around trying to find the kids and take them away whom they had pictures of. He tried to explain to them that they were just kids, demonstrating because they could, to go easy on them.

Everywhere I've gone lately just after a raid, or a demonstration which has turned bloody, when people realize we are western, they crowd around us and begin yelling for us to leave. They threaten to kick us. Sometimes even to kill. In their deep sadness and growing fury they need a release.

The mainstream media is always quick to converge on these scenes of the aftermath, interviewing and filming people on the street. The Iraqi people are telling their story; of their family members being shot in front of their face, detained, or wounded.

Then the media are taking their film back to Baghdad, and not showing it, for the most part.

The ongoing media censorship in the west is making the lives of independent journalists and aid workers alike in Iraq more dangerous by not showing the daily tragedies which are touching every persons life in this country, in one form or another.

Only through having Ahmed, or Hamudi, or one of the other brilliant interpreters that I've been lucky enough to work with, have we been able to have it explained to the enraged Iraqis that we are independent, and want to tell their story.

This trend is continuing, and has certainly made it much more risky to be at the scene of a demonstration in Al-Adhamiya after a funeral, when peoples hearts are bleeding with sorrow and want desperately to do something about this terrible epidemic of slaughter by the Americans.

A man named Dawud is selling black plastic bags on the sidewalk in Baghdad on this chilly day.

He tells me, "Will catching Saddam put petrol in my car? Will catching Saddam put food on my families table in the night? Will catching Saddam make it safer for my daughter to go to school and not get kidnapped or raped? Will catching Saddam stop the Americans from shooting demonstrators? Will catching Saddam make the Americans leave our country now? What has catching Saddam done for me? Tell me!"