OUTSIDE, the music of Baghdad plays on: angry sirens, gunshots from masked thugs, the squeal of brakes and helicopter gunships mutilating the air above the Tigris.

Inside, violins play as an orchestra practises for an end-of-year concert, and children rehearse their pirouettes. On the walls are paintings of the composer Robert Schumann and of Mesopotamian instruments.

Here, on one of the most dangerous roads in the Iraqi capital, undaunted by the low-level conflict raging all around it, stands Baghdad’s Music and Ballet School — the city’s Fame Academy. It is the only one in Iraq.

A mortar shell recently landed in the scrubby courtyard and guards watch out for car-bombers attacking American convoys. The windows are regularly broken by explosions. The adjacent Iraqi Army base in the western suburb of Mansour is a favourite target of bombers.

Few outsiders venture to Mansour these days. It is named after the 8th-century Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jaafar al-Mansour, who founded Baghdad, but the district has long ago surrendered its Western embassies and diplomatic residences to insurgent-compatible refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi.

Inside the school’s blue gates Iraqi youngsters — Sunni, Shia and Christian, headscarved and secular, shaven and hirsute — rush through the corridors knocking back Diet Coke, gossiping and dividing their day between the artistic and academic syllabuses of their 12-year study programme.

Clad in a black leotard and proper dancing shoes donated by foreign charities, Balsam Anmar, 9, admits that she has never seen a ballet, either in real life or on television. Most of her classmates also shake their heads.

But for the 220 pupils aged 6 to 18 the school is a refuge from violence and sectarianism. “I like ballet,” Balsam grins. “I like it when I come to school. I forget all the problems outside. The bombs, the car bombs, the traffic jams.”

The school’s ethos was laid down firmly from day one by Najiha Naief Hommadi, its director for the past 21 years. Asked how many Sunnis and Shias she has on the school roll she falls silent with disapproval. “We don’t know. We have students,” she says firmly.

“After the war I gathered all the students together. I told them, ‘You all have your personal opinions, your religion, your beliefs, but these you leave outside. Once you come through that gate you are students. We love each other. We love Iraq, and we work to build Iraq again’.” As she speaks she tucks back into her black headscarf a fringe of brown hair streaked with iron.

Her will is of iron too. She has stewarded her charges from the era of command performances at Saddam Hussein’s palaces to celebrate his birthdays, through the Iran-Iraq conflict and two Gulf wars, the looting that followed Saddam’s fall, the insurgency and now the advent of Islamist Shia clerics not known for their love of Debussy and Prokofiev.

With anti-Western jihadists and radicals seemingly everywhere in Iraq, the school’s staff are now cautious about proclaiming their love of the fine arts. Ghada al-Taie, a ballet teacher for nine years, no longer dares to tell taxi drivers what she does. “I don’t even tell all my family what I do, because some of my relatives are religious. I just tell them I work at the Ministry of Culture.”

For the guardians of Iraq’s ancient traditions of culture, dating back millennia to the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Kingdom of Hatra, these are devastating times. A mile to the east of the school stands Iraq’s National Museum, looted of many treasures and with no hope of opening until order is restored. Across Iraq ancient burial grounds and archaeological sites are being stripped of their historic contents.

The performing arts fared little better. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait the Russian, Hungarian and Czech ballet and music teachers who trained the ballet school’s staff left Iraq. No longer could ballet dresses be imported from France, and a decade of sanctions took their toll on the wardrobe and instruments.

Then, following the US invasion of 2003, came the looters, stripping the school of its 40 violins, all its French horns, trumpets, flutes and Arabic instruments — and all but seven of its 25 pianos. “We found only the walls, nothing else,” Mrs Hommadi sighs. “I cried when I entered. It was so painful for me. What wasn’t looted was broken.”

Now the salaries are again being paid by the Government and the instruments have been replaced by Norwegian and Swiss donors.

But although the walls are plastered with children’s pictures and tinsel, and Mrs Hommadi hopes that her pupils will become tomorrow’s stars of Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra, her thoughts drift to waste and loss. “If it hadn’t been for all those wars, there would have been maybe ten of these schools in Iraq. All that potential. All that talent . . .”

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