Iraqis trading homes for lives

"Until early this year, Raad Chasep was a prince of the farming plains in the Abu Ghraib area of the Euphrates Valley, west of Baghdad. Today he and his family are paupers, displaced and distraught as civil war tears Iraq apart.

On the verge of tears, the 39-year-old described the rural mansion they swapped last week for a two-room hovel in this Shiite quarter of Baghdad's north-west: "We had three reception rooms, nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms. We had our own meat, vegetables, milk … but tonight we have no dinner.""