Three suicide bombers disguised themselves as women Friday and, with explosives hidden by long black cloaks, killed 79 people and wounded more than 160 when they blew themselves up in a Shiite mosque in the capital. One bomber came through the women's security checkpoint at the Buratha mosque in northern Baghdad and detonated explosives just as worshippers were leaving at the end of Friday prayers.

Two other bombers took advantage of the confusion to blow themselves up a few seconds later, killing the people who were trying to escape.

The savage attack, the worst in months, came almost exactly on the third anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by American and British armies on April 9, 2003. The war was portrayed at the time as freeing Iraqis from fear, but Iraqi officials have told The Independent that at least 100 people are being killed in Baghdad every day.

The slaughter of Shiite Muslims in the Buratha mosque probably will lead to revenge attacks against Sunni Arabs whose community harbors the Salafi and Jihadi fanatics, who see the Shiites as heretics. Ever since the bombing of the al-Askari Shrine in Samara on Feb. 22, the Shiite militias have retaliated whenever Shiites are killed.

The bombing of the mosque, a religious complex linked to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, pushes Iraq well down the road to outright civil war between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, the preacher in the Buratha mosque, declared: "The Shiite are the target and it's a sectarian act. There is nothing to justify this act but black sectarian hatred."

Men screamed in anger and fear as they rolled the bodies of the dead onto wooden carts so they could be loaded into ambulances. "This is a cowardly act. Every time I see these bloody scenes it tears apart my heart," said Jawwad Kathim, a fireman.

It was the worst sectarian bombing for four months. The day before a car bomb exploded near the Shiite shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, killing 13 people.

"My house is opposite to the mosque and when we heard the first blast I ran to make sure that my father, who was praying there, was safe," Naba Mohsin said. "When I entered the mosque a second huge blast occurred and I saw a big blast with flames. I want to know if my father is alive."

I have been covering the war in Iraq ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so grim. More than a week ago, I was in the northern city of Mosul, protected by 3,000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so it was considered too dangerous to send out patrols in daytime. It is safer at night because of a curfew.

In March alone, the U.S. military said 1,313 people were killed in sectarian attacks. Many bodies, buried in pits or thrown in the rivers, are never found.

The real figure is probably twice as high. All over the country people are on the move as Sunnis and Shiites flee each other's areas.

I was in Lebanon at the start of the civil war in 1975. Baghdad today resembles Beirut then. People are being murdered solely because of their religious identity. A friend called to say he had a problem because his two half brothers had been born in Fallujah, the Sunni Muslim stronghold, and this was on their identity cards. If they were picked up by Shiite militiamen, a glance at their place of birth alone could get them killed.

Fleeing one danger in Baghdad, it is easy to become victim of another.

The friend had taken his mother and two sisters to the passport office in Baghdad so they could leave the country. While they were there, a bomb went off, killing 25 policemen outside and breaking his sister's leg.

Now the family cannot leave because his sister is in the hospital and his mother is too frightened to return to get a new passport.

Bush and Blair have for the past three years continually understated the gravity of what is taking place. It has been frustrating as a journalist to hear them claim that much of Iraq is peaceful when we could not prove them wrong without being killed or kidnapped. The capture of Saddam in 2003, the handover of sovereignty in 2004, the elections and new constitution in 2005 have all been oversold to the outside world as signs of progress.

The formation of a national unity government in Iraq is now being presented as an antidote to the violence. "Terrorists love a vacuum," said British Defense Secretary John Reid, citing his experience in Northern Ireland. But one Iraqi official remarked that the three main communities -- Sunni, Shiite and Kurds -- do not hate one another because they do not have a government, but rather they do not have a government because they already hate one another.

The coalition of Iraqi religious parties, the United Iraqi Alliance, won almost half the seats in the 275-member parliament in the election on Dec.15. They fear the United States and Britain are trying to break up the Shiite coalition. This is why they have resisted demands for Ibrahim al-Jaafari to stand down as prime minister. Even if a national unity government is formed, it will control very little. The army and police take their orders from the leaders of their own communities.

Three years ago, when Saddam's statue was toppled, Iraqis were promised their lives would get better. Instead Iraq has become the most dangerous place in the world.

Patrick Cockburn writes for The Independent in Britain.

"We have to make clear that there are some forces out of order, not under our control and not under the control of the ministry of defence," he said.

"These forces are the FPS to protect the ministries," he said, referring to special security forces known as Force Protection for Site (FPS) which protect ministry buildings, power stations or oil pipelines.

"And their numbers are huge... there are 150,000," he said.

"Their uniform is like the police, their car is like the police, their weapons are like the police."

A recent upsurge of sectarian violence in Iraq that has left hundreds of dead is often blamed by Sunnis on militias wearing uniforms belonging to the security forces.

"Terrorists or someone who supports the terrorists... are using the clothes of the police or the military," Solagh said in comments published on the BBC website.

"Now you can go to the shop and buy it."

The question to the group of women delegates from Iraq was "What would you like to see come out of this meeting?"

I was not prepared either for the answer or for its explanation: "What we need now," one of the Iraqi woman said, "is the end of the blood-letting. Women are very necessary to this operation. Fifty-five to 60 percent of Iraqis are women. The minority is ruling ... Women must interfere in the affairs of men. We should take over."

It was hardly a statement I expected to hear in this place from these women. But I couldn't forget it.

"The minority is ruling." Right. And not too well, it seems, either here or there.

When men sit down to negotiate peace treaties -- when there's even someone to negotiate with, which, given al-Qaeda, is not a luxury we seem to have anymore -- they disband armies and guard borders and hold military tribunals and form new governments and punish old ones. But they put no faces on the victims.

When they tote up the cost of the war, they do not include the number of women raped, the number of families displaced, the number of schools bombed, or the number of babies without milk.

The victors take their spoils, monitor the guns, forget the defenseless and leave the people to clean up the rubble. War becomes the daily dirge of the anonymous victims.

But when you bring women together to discuss the effects of war, the things that need to be changed, the real problems of a war-torn society, the conversation takes a sudden turn.

At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women's Global Peace Initiative in New York on March 29, the differences were plain. The women's first agenda did not concentrate on who did what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. "Take the oil. We don't care about the oil," one woman called across the room. "We never got any value from it anyway," she went on. "Never mind yesterday," another woman said in answer to the Sunni- Shi'ite tensions. "Forget who did what to whom. We must turn the page now. We must rebuild the country."

"And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?" we asked them. I sat with my hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call was clear: "Take care of our children."

It was a sobering moment. Take care of our children. "Oh, them," I thought. "The tiny, the forgotten, targets of this war."

Take care of the ones who now carry within themselves the sour taste of fear that came as bombs dropped through the dark sky shaking their houses, destroying their streets. Take care of the children, the ones who went cold as stone at the loss of brothers and fathers and dead playmates.

Take care of the ones who felt the sweat of terror when the doors of the homes in which they were sure they were safe broke down in the middle of the night or the lights went out or their mothers wrapped their shawls around their heads and cried. Take care of the ones who went into psychic paralysis at the sight of blood and bodies. Take care of the ones who woke up one morning to find their lives completely disrupted for no apparent reason.

Take care of the ones to whom then Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently referring when a reporter asked him how many Iraqis had been killed or injured at that point in the war and his answer was, "That is a number in which I have absolutely no interest whatsoever."

But maybe he and we should all rethink that answer. Because these children do not feel "liberated" by this war; in these children the seeds of the next war have already been planted.

The Iraqi women were very clear: the most injured of all in this war are the children of Iraq. "The war has made deep wounds that have become part of our souls," another woman said. "They can never be forgotten. The living conditions, the lack of security is affecting everything the children do. They cannot even deliver newspapers anymore."

Their schooling has been interrupted. Even if the school buildings still stand, there are no supplies for them. And there are few people in them anyway. Teachers are dead. Classmates are gone from the area -- refugees somewhere or dead themselves. Most of all, their parents are afraid to send them out of the house even if the schools are undamaged.

"Our childhood is killed in Iraq," a woman said. "It is killed."

The small jobs children once held to help with family expenses are gone now. No one buys flowers on the street now. No one drives a car whose windows they can wash.

Drugs are flooding the streets now and drugs are the best and quickest way to ease the pain.

The number of street children -- children whose parents are dead, whose extended families are fractured -- have multiplied beyond anything modern Iraq has ever known.

Orphans are a commodity now in Iraq but orphanages are not. "We are taking care of the orphans, trying to give them love," the woman said. "But they are traumatized. They don't speak."

Recreational programs are a thing of the past, so children are restless or rebellious or simply bored with life.

"Fifty percent of the bodies in the hospital are women and children," the doctor said. "We are afraid that a large number of children will be affected by the depression of their mothers and the loss of their fathers and the poverty of their families."

The future of Iraq is at stake. But it is not the banking system the women are concerned about. It is the treasure of the nation that is being squandered, they know. It is their future. It is their children.

The U.S. budget for fiscal year 2007, according to The National Priorities Project, earmarks 51 percent of all discretionary spending for military use. "Spending on the Iraq War in fiscal year 2006 alone will reach $96 billion," the Project reports. (www.nationalpriorities.org)

The Bush budget calls for the elimination or reduction of 141 domestic programs. Among other things, we cut the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children by $200 million and the department of education by 9 percent and eliminate vocational education. "Level funding" is provided for other domestic programs.

The overall cost of the war in Iraq for the United States is already being estimated at at least a trillion dollars. But so far not a penny of it is specified for the children. Neither theirs nor ours.

"We see the prisoners' rights," another delegate said sadly, "but where are the rights of the children."

From where I stand, I can't help but wonder that if we sold some of our weapons and used the money to buy crayons, food, houses and schools for Iraqi children, we could stop worrying about being terrorized ourselves. Indeed, the minority is ruling. Maybe the Iraqi woman's idea about what to do about it wouldn't be a bad one after all.

Editor's Note: From Where I Stand is normally posted to NCRonline.org Thursday afternoons, but Sr. Joan Chittister's heavier than usual schedule of speaking engagements in April has disrupted our posting routines. We are sorry for the delays and ask you patience.

A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Joan Chittister is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer on topics of justice, peace, human rights, women's issues, and contemporary spirituality in the Church and in society. She presently serves as the co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the United Nations, facilitating a worldwide network of women peace builders, especially in the Middle East. A speech communications theorist, Sister Joan's most recent books include The Way We Were (Orbis) and Called to Question (Sheed & Ward), a First Place CPA 2005 award winner. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision, a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality in Erie.

According to Sabah Saied, head of the local Red Crescent Association in Amara province, some 290km south-east of Baghdad, 380 Shi'ite families were currently seeking shelter in an abandoned factory there. "There's no shortage at all, but we need to have at least one ambulance in case of emergency," Saied complained.

Hamdan Abdullah, a 58-year old Shi'ite coffee shop owner, said that his family fled the Latifiya area, 30km south of Baghdad, after receiving leaflets reading: "Tell your Shi'ite government to provide you with houses far away from ours."

A spate of sectarian violence erupted in the wake of the 22 February bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, some 120km north of the capital. Since then, hundreds of people have been killed and dozens of mosques damaged or destroyed as a result of reprisal attacks between the country's two major Muslim denominations.

Fernandez went on to cite a number of problems facing local hospitals in Basra, which is located some 550km south of the capital, Baghdad. "Hospitals have no ventilators to help prematurely-born babies breathe," Fernandez said. "And there are very few nurses available, so hospitals often must allow family members to care for patients."

Many doctors in the area say that the local health situation has deteriorated markedly since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30 percent compared to the Saddam Hussein era," Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at the Basra Children's Hospital, pointed out. "Children are dying daily, and no one is doing anything to help them."

Fernandez added that, for the last three years, the Maternity and Children's' hospital in Basra had not received any cancer drugs from the health ministry. "In all of Basra, a city with nearly two million inhabitants, there's no radiotherapy department available," Fernandez complained.

Khalid Ala'a, spokesman for local NGO Keeping Children Alive, said that Basra hospitals lacked many essential drugs and antibiotics used to treat infections common to the area. "We've asked for help from the Ministry of Health, but they only tell us they don't have money to supply hospitals," Ala'a said. "They tell us we must wait for investment, which could take months."

Health ministry officials, responding to the charges, point to the ongoing deadlock over the formation of a new government. "We depend on the central government for money," said senior ministry official Ahmed Salahdinne. "What we're receiving, we're distributing, according to our capacity, to all areas of Iraq."

According to doctors and NGOs, the primary causes of high infant mortality are unsafe water, diarrhoea, malnutrition, infectious diseases, maternal stress and poverty. In light of these grave circumstances, local NGOs and doctors have called on international aid agencies to help ease the situation.