ON MONDAY evening I went to say goodbye to an Iraqi friend.

Suad works in a boutique — a simple woman trying to learn English with a tattered teach-yourself book she found in a market. She earns money dressing rich women, the wives of elite Baath Party members whose extravagant lives contrast sharply with the dreariness of her own. But she never complains about sanctions, about her lot in life, and certainly not about her Government or her country.

Like many Iraqis I met during my two-month stay in Baghdad, Suad wards off any discussion of politics with a flick of her hand. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she would say. Instead, in broken English, she talked about her wish to learn the language and to understand what life is like in America or Britain. It is an odd enthusiasm given that those two countries are about to bomb her own into oblivion.

In recent weeks, Suad would ask me every day: “Boom-boom tomorrow?” “Not yet,” I would tell her, and her face would brighten with relief. This time she did not need to ask. She knew what was happening by the mood of panic in the city, by the sight of vendors wheeling their goods home to hide, by the telephone calls from her relatives urging her not to go to work after today.

As I explained to Suad that I had to leave Baghdad for reasons out of my control she burst into tears. “Don’t leave us,” she said, clinging to me. “We don’t know what will happen here.”

I felt a sense of guilt, of betrayal. We journalists can leave; the ordinary Iraqis who have become our friends must remain to face the war alone.

Hearing Suad’s words made me vividly aware that the life the Iraqis have known under President Saddam Hussein will change irrevocably over the next 72 hours.

The Bush Administration, far away in Washington, likes to think that the Iraqi people will be dancing in the streets if Saddam falls, but they may be reckoning without the fact that Iraqis, like the Afghans, traditionally loathe any kind of invasion or occupation, having suffered it for centuries.

It is difficult to decide what the people really think because most have long since learnt to mask their feelings. People do not speak openly, even though the government-appointed “minders” who accompany reporters will say heartily: “Ask them whatever you want.”

You may ask, but you probably would not get the answer. Fear is an integral part of the Iraqi mentality, as real as the whispered mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, who strategically position themselves on leather sofas in the al-Rasheed Hotel lobby to keep tabs on the journalists hurrying past.

Even mentioning the name mukhabarat is taboo. Iraqis do not say the word outright. They tend to point upwards to the sky, insinuating “upstairs”.

In Iraq, nearly every aspect of life is controlled. Neighbours can spy on neighbours. Waiters in restaurants hover over tables, listening and noting. Westerners’ hotel rooms are routinely searched, suitcases opened, papers rifled through. Telephones are usually monitored, so clumsily that sometimes you can hear your eavesdropper breathing or coughing on the other end.

If you wander, minder in tow, through the streets or the souks, through the winding lanes of old Baghdad where remnants of colonial Britain survive, you can ask people questions, but must choose your words carefully. Merely broaching certain subjects can put them at great risk.

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