BASRA, Iraq: School is over for Mohammed Al Ramahi _ for good. From now on, he's going to be
                   selling vegetables in the market. "There's no use going to school," said Mohammed, 13, who has
                   recently completed what his father has decided will be the boy's last year of formal education. "Life is
                   so hard and I have to help my father. I don't feel so happy about it but I must help."

                   Mohammed stood behind a row of cucumbers at his father's stall, his body language confident and
                   adult, his voice still unbroken. His father, Karim Al Ramahi, appeared out of the shopping crowd and
                   explained why he had taken his son out of school.

                   "I appreciate that learning is very important and he's still a kid but things are so tough," said the father
                   of five. "The embargo has created a real crisis so everyone has to do his best to get through. I have to
                   take care of my family or they'll collapse."

                   Mohammed is part of a generation of young Iraqis who have grown up in a decade of increasing
                   poverty and continuing economic sanctions. Many his age are dropping out of school to start work
                   before they have started to shave.In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city and a place of perhaps
                   unparalleled poverty in this formerly wealthy country, there are many children like Mohammed. All
                   over the town's "souk," or market, young boys push large barrows of potatoes or flour. They call out
                   the prices of car parts from stalls. They offer shoeshines. For the first time in people's memory,
                   children are sleeping on the streets of the capital, Baghdad. The kids who do stay in school, teachers
                   and aid workers say, are becoming increasingly apathetic, hopeless and bitter about the outside world
                   that the children blame for their loss of opportunities and hunger.

                   Some aid workers and diplomats are worried that the Western countries like the United States and
                   Britain that insist on continuing the decade-old embargo are helping to create a generation that is
                   demoralized, undereducated and developing a hatred of the West.

                   "If you look at the possibility of a whole generation not feeling that their hopes and aspirations can be
                   met, combined with this situation of isolation by the international community and feeling to a great
                   extent that the rest of the world is responsible, you have to look at the ramifications for peace," said
                   Anupama Rao Singh, the head of the United Nations' children's organization, UNICEF, in Iraq.

                   Abdul Razak Hashemi, a minister in the Iraqi government, was less diplomatic: "God help the West
                   for the hate growing up in Iraqi children."A State Department official, who spoke on condition of
                   anonymity, acknowledged that the US government is aware of the hostility to the West among the
                   younger generation in Iraq but said it is not a top priority. "At this point, it's not a war for the hearts
                   and minds," the official said. "It's a question of the security of the region. At this point it's not a
                   popularity contest."

                   Young Iraqis, the official said, are bound to feel hostility toward the United States and its allies
                   because the people of Iraq do not have access to free information and are susceptible to President
                   Saddam Hussein's propaganda.

                   For many young people, however, daily survival is life's main concern.

                   It was past midnight on a recent night and the platforms of Baghdad's bus station were dark and
                   punctuated by the bodies of sleeping men. By the bare electric light bulbs of the food stands that stay
                   open all night, a boy sat behind his shoeshine box.

                   He can't read or write. Behind his bony chest are lungs that struggle with asthma. His mother is long
                   dead. He's a sweet boy, polite and a little nervous and usually hungry. He left home more than a year
                   ago because his stepmother wanted him to beg in the streets and he hasn't been back since.

                   "Sometimes I sleep here," said the boy, Ibrahim, 15. "Well, every day."

                   Ibrahim makes 1,000 dinars, or 50 cents, in a day, sometimes a quarter. What he makes he has to
                   split with the man who actually owns the box full of brushes, rags and polish. He's a nice man, Ibrahim
                   said. No one in the bus station, the regulars, takes advantage of him. Even the police are sympathetic.

                   Ibrahim is part of a growing number of homeless children in Baghdad, a fact that the government is
                   highly sensitive about. Although the government minder who accompanies foreign journalists
                   everywhere was quite willing to take a journalist to see dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, it took several
                   days to gain permission to interview homeless children. Requests for access to Baghdad's only center
                   for homeless children, Dar Al Rahma (House of Mercy), were denied.

                   And the reason for the sensitivity is this: Iraqis, people with a history of extended family responsibility
                   and extensive government social welfare programs, are simply embarrassed that families and society
                   at large can no longer guarantee a home for every Iraqi child. While dying children is a crime against
                   Iraq, to many Iraqis, the existence of homeless children is a stain on the national honor.

                   Officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs did not respond to requests for
                   interviews, but Singh said the Iraqi government is beginning to address the problem.

                   "It's one of the areas we've had a lot of forward movement in the last two years," she said. "Two or
                   three years ago they weren't willing to discuss the issue."

                   Some are critical of the progress. According to aid workers who have been there, the 18-month-old
                   Dar Al Rahma center resembles a prison more than a haven for homeless children. Armed guards
                   surround the building, which the children cannot leave. Street kids are mixed inside with young
                   criminals. There are no social workers to help the roughly 75 children inside _ only a sociologist and a
                   psychologist. Still, inside the center the children can go to school and learn crafts like carpentry, so
                   things are getting better, aid workers said. But the news has spread on the streets that Dar Al Rahma
                   is best avoided.

                   When the police do speak to Ibrahim, they tell him he should go home or find the center. Home is
                   where his drunken father and abusive stepmother are. He won't go back there. And he said he hasn't
                   made it to the center because "I don't know the address."

                   An Iraqi man listening to the conversation had his own interpretation. "He knows where it is," the man
                   said. "He just doesn't want to go there." -Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c)Newsday.