By Jamal Ahmad

    BAGHDAD, March 19 (Xinhua) -- "When the war broke out five years ago, my husband and I thought after it gets over, we could spend the rest of our lives like those in a Gulf or an European country. Now I ended up a lonely and displaced widow," said Um Waleed just before the fifth anniversary of the devastating U.S.-led invasion.

    The woman in her 60s, wearing black headscarf and all-covering abaya, lives with her two daughters and 11-year-old grandson, struggling for survival after she lost her husband to a battle between the U.S. troops and Iraqi insurgents more than three years ago in a Baghdad street.

    One year later, her two sons were taken away from their house in the northern neighborhood of Hurriyah and killed by Shiite militiamen.

    Early in 2006, gunmen bombed the Askari shrine, one of the most sacred Shiite shrines in Samarra, 120 km north of Baghdad, sparking waves of gruesome sectarian violence and a turf war in the Iraqi capital that have shaped a patchwork of separate Sunni and Shiite enclaves.

    Her family was driven out because the Shiite militiamen were accusing them as terrorists. Joining them were some 300 other Sunni families during a five-month turmoil in the neighborhood.

    More than 100 Sunnis were killed and at least five Sunni mosques burned during the months of fighting in Hurriyah neighborhood between Shiites and Sunnis following the Samarra bombing.

    "My family and I used to live in peace there. I've never expected that one day our dear neighbors would kill my sons. They had been friends," Um Waleed complained to reporter at her small vegetable stall in the Sunni-populated Khadraa district in western Baghdad.

    "We were poor, but lived in peace and happiness before the invasion. Now we are starving, displaced and yearning for security."

    "They killed my two sons because they refused to leave. I begged them (her sons) to leave, I begged them," she muttered, staring at her vegetable stall with tears rolling down her cheek, apparently immersed in the painful memory.

    After five years of the U.S.-led invasion, there are believed to be over four million displaced Iraqis around the world, including some 2.2 million inside Iraq and similar numbers in neighboring countries.

    Most of the internally displaced Iraqis left home because of direct threats to their lives, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration in late 2007.

    The displacement crisis became one of the gravest consequences of the Iraq war. To many, displacement only without taking into account anything else, means a plunge in the quality of life, if there is any.

    In Um Waleed's modest single-story house, the walls of the living room were planted with wires, just like other houses in the neighborhood. They got power from three sources, the government supply, a large generator in the neighborhood and her small generator.

    The government provides power for a mere two to three hours a day. The residents have to make up for the shortage by buying electricity from owners of bigger generators in the neighborhood.

    Um Waleed took out a small box of rationed tea from a cupboard and insisted to make some. But the tea was too bitter to drink, though coupled with spoons of sugar.

    "Some people in the neighborhood are so kind to me. They spend their money on part of the gasoline my small generator needs, because I can't afford all with my meagre income," she said.

    With all the wires on the walls she can only run her TV and a couple of fluorescent bulbs.

    As summer draws near with a temperature usually reaching 50Celsius degree, Um Waleed would find it harder to provide further amount of power to operate her old refrigerator. She will also need more power for water pump because tap water is usually very thin, especially in summer.

    Her daughters, Salma, 22 and Aseel, 19, are staying home and preparing themselves to find a job. Salma, who lost her husband in the war, is training to be seamstress to eke out the family's bare existence and her son Hammoodi's study.

    Aseel, who graduated from a high school two years ago, is looking forward to going to college, but she has to wait until things are better because the study needs money, and given their current circumstances, it would be impossible.

    "I thought things would be better than Saddam's time but after five years, life has gone from bad to worse," she said. Hammoodi was six years old when his father was killed. Still a carefree boy, he was fiddling with a mobile-shaped toy, pretending he was calling someone.

    Um Waleed said she did not regard the gunmen who drove her out as genuine Shiite Muslims. "Many of my old Shiite neighbors are still looking after me and my children. Sometimes they send me money to help with my life," she said.

    "At the fifth anniversary, we suffered a lot and the government is only doing little to help displaced families, let alone to help them back to their homes," she said.