"I'm here all day except Fridays when my mum takes me to the mosque," says five-year-old Mohammad. "Sometimes people give me some money, sometimes it's food or sweets. Most people give me nothing," the barefoot dirty child said.

Born after United Nations sanctions were imposed in 1990, many Iraqi children have grown up in poverty, with little health care and rampant malnutrition. Pressed into work at an age when western children would be starting primary school, few are educated.

Many schools have closed from lack of maintenance. Even if the children wanted to go to school their families could not afford it. Government subsidies are low andthe costs of school supplies or even shoes, clothes and transport are high. Technically, child begging is illegal, but "it is not enforced. Parents used to be jailed for allowing their children to beg or work. That rarely happens now," said a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Baghdad.

Caught between the need to educate and the battle to fight poverty, the authorities have been left with little choice but to turn a blind eye.

According to UNICEF as many as one million children missed the 1997-1998 school year in a country which once boasted one of the best education systems in the Middle East.

It is a far cry from life in Iraq just a few years ago. "Before the Gulf War it used to be an ordeal to find a family living in absolute poverty in Baghdad. There were a few, but not many. Now we are swamped," the UNICEF spokeswoman said.

"The middle class has ceased to exist, now there is only the poor and the upper class. You find architects and airline pilots driving taxis -- ourIraqi drivers have masters degrees in engineering," she said.

Street work is hard at the best of times. Pollution, heat and cold compete with the fast moving traffic to ensure that the children's lives are fraught with danger. But there are other, less visible, risks.

Diseases like cholera and typhoid were practically unknown in Iraq before sanctions. Although they have yet to reach epidemic proportions, they are now widespread and deadly.

"They re-emerged almost immediately as the country's infrastructure broke down and could not be repaired. We used to bring in the vaccines but that task has now been handed back to the Government," the UNICEF spokeswoman said.

The handover came following the introduction of the UN oil-for-food programme in December 1996 that allows Iraq to sell limited quantities of crude in return for basic products including food and medicine.

Tough though life may be for many of Iraq's urban children, conditions for their counterparts in the three northern autonomous Kurdishprovinces of Iraq are worse. Having fled the unrest that has rocked the region, many now live in the squalor of refugee camps and face the lack of hygiene, food and medical supplies that entails. "We just don't know when all of this will end. Right now, we are working in an emergency situation where the immediate aim is simply to contain the problem," the UNICEF spokeswoman said.