THE war came as a surprise for the people who live on the rubbish heap at the northern entrance to Baghdad. The drivers of the garbage lorries had gossiped about the threat of an American invasion, but it was not until the bombs came crashing down around them that they realised that their country was at war.

Cut off from the outside world, the 150 landfill-dwellers live in a village built on rubbish and from rubbish. The walls of their tiny huts are a mixture of mud and discarded cooking-oil cans, their goats and cows graze the stinking dunes of litter, chewing on rotten food and paper bags.

Every morning, the villagers drive their herds to a muddy pond that they have created around a standpipe next to the highway leading north to Tikrit. In the half-light of dawn, the scene is almost bucolic — only the sickly smell of decay and the smoke rising from smouldering rubbish tips hint at the landscape’s true nature.

Once the sun is up, the stench is smothering, as flies gather in black clouds and the villagers go about the day’s tasks: sorting out salvageable cans for resale at a half- penny each, watering the animals and baking bread in primitive clay ovens. To buy flour, they sell their goat meat, although local people will not drink the milk of animals raised on refuse.

Eking out their existence here for the past five years, the villagers are entirely dependent on rubbish. When a local contractor levelled the landfill next to their shacks, they had to bribe the bin men to keep dumping Baghdad’s waste next to the village.

“We live in the worst situation here,” said Menwar Jaba, who says that she is in her 30s but whose careworn face looks closer to 50. “But what can we do? We can’t leave because of the animals. They live off the rubbish.”

Most of the people here are from the area of al-Kut in the south, driven off their land when their water supplies there dried up. Saddam Hussein’s hierarchical and paranoid regime did not trust migrants and tried to return them to their arid pastures. Instead, they ended up living on the landfill in Baghdad’s al-Taji district.

Without electricity or television, Mrs Jaba and her family had heard vague rumours of the approaching war. They knew it had started only when American bombs started to fall on the nearby army bases that line the road north.

The people pooled what little cash they had saved and loaded their livestock into vans to leave the area, grazing their animals outside Baghdad as the war raged and the old order crumbled. Then they came back to find a new addition to their trove of scrap — a burnt-out wreck of a surface-to-air missile-launcher, abandoned with its crew’s helmets, next to their huts.

Since then, little has changed. Saddam’s police no longer come to harass them, but American rubbish is no more valuable than Iraqi.

“We heard the Americans made promises to the Iraqi people, but so far we received nothing,” Sirhan Muri, 56, said as he squatted among empty US Army ration bags.

So far, American soldiers have been too busy trying to curb deadly attacks on their convoys heading north on the road past the camp to visit its miserable dwellers.

The fall of a regime and the struggle to create a new order in Iraq has made no impression in the drudgery of life on the dump.

“Saddam never bothered about us, and the Americans don’t bother about us. They just leave us here,” Mrs Jaba said.

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