NAIM GUMAR jokes that he has a problem with Iraq’s nascent democracy and the new-fangled goods that it has brought. His young sons were spending too much time playing shoot-’em-up games on their new computer. When he imposed a limit, they protested.

“The boys held up posters demanding they be allowed to play . . . it must be something they picked up on the streets,” he said.

It is two years today since the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue marked the fall of Baghdad. It is a time for Mr Gumar to take stock. He spent a decade as a political prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison, lives in the capital’s vast Sadr City slum and struggles to support a wife and six children on £80 a month.

Although his family’s standard of living has barely changed, he remains excited by his country’s experiment with democracy. The problem, he said, is that it must start to deliver tangible improvements soon or Iraq will slide into sectarian conflict.

“From the point of view of the people’s health, we can stand it taking years — but politically and economically, we don’t have that long,” he said.

The lack of progress is obvious. Two million dirt-poor Shia live in Sadr City, surrounded by rubbish and pools of sewage. Residents say that the Americans who fought a Shia militia there last summer have reneged on their promise to rebuild the area.

Mr Gumar’s wife, Umm Mohammed, said that during the Saddam era “we spent 20 years on the run, and we had to move 17 times to avoid the police. I never imagined things could get worse but, since the war, they have.”

She complained that her children are underfed and small for their age. The United Nations reported recently that child malnutrition had almost doubled since the fall of Baghdad.

Umm Mohammed is exhausted from having to shop every day because the infrequent electricity supply — two hours on, four hours off — means that she cannot store food in the fridge. She goes everywhere on foot as the family cannot afford a car.

After his release from Abu Ghraib, Mr Gumar had to sell cigarettes on the street. The bright new future that he envisaged when Saddam fell has failed to materialise. He has found work at a supermarket, but only for two days a week because the shop was looted and burnt in the chaos after Baghdad fell and no one has the money to rebuild it.

He held up a shaking hand. “This is from hunger,” he explained, in the calm manner of one who survived Saddam’s torture cells. For breakfast the family shares two tiny pots of yoghurt, with tea and bread. For lunch they eat rice and vegetable sauce. Dinner is eggs, tomatoes and bread. They can afford that sparse fare only because his wife inherited their house.

With food prices double their prewar level and rents often quadrupled, the line between survival and destitution is thin. “We only taste meat when richer relatives invite us over,” Mr Gumar said.

Mr Gumar used the £100 he earned as an election monitor to buy his sons a computer — the only mod-con in a spartan home furnished only with rugs and cushions on an uneven concrete floor.

To get to work takes Mr Gumar an hour and two changes of minibus, although it is not far away. Baghdad’s traffic remains chaotic. Traffic lights do not work, because of the lack of electricity. Many streets are blocked by huge concrete blast walls protecting official buildings.

In the main streets of Sadr City, tractors drag away piles of rubbish. In many sidestreets, flocks of goats graze on stinking rubbish heaped up beside charred lorries and buses left from last summer’s uprising.

Mr Gumar said that sewage leaks into drinking water and people cannot afford fuel to boil it clean. An outbreak of hepatitis last year made scores sick and killed several.

The insurgency has tapered off a little since the elections in January, but kidnapping and crime are still rife. Umm Mohammed dreads letting her children play outside. “It’s a dangerous world out there,” she said. While extremist followers of Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shia cleric who led the uprising last summer, have switched to a more political track, they may take up arms again. No one dares to criticise them in public.

Yet, for all the hardships, the family rejoices that the dictator who once persecuted them is now in prison, and that Iraq has a new Government.

“Our democracy is still in the kindergarten. Even though I’m 44, I’m happy to be in this kindergarten,” Mr Gumar said.

COST OF LIVING

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