http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1514&e=20&u=/afp/20031031/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_homeless_031031112730BAGHDAD (AFP) - Hundreds of families who lost their homes to post-war rent hikes are bracing for the freezing winter season, haunted by the fear of another expulsion from their dilapidated shacks along Baghdad's notoriously violent airport road.
"I was thrown out of my apartment after the war. The owners wanted to increase the rent and I do not have money," said Um Shawki, 57, who hails from the modest al-Karkh neighborhood in Baghdad.
With no place to go, she found refuge in a rundown house under construction along the airport road, known by US soldiers as the "highway of death" for the repeated anti-coalition guerrilla attacks.
"The only place I could find, were these pillars of an unfinished house. With the help of some other homeless people, I was able to put corrugated iron as a rooftop to make the place liveable," she said Friday, leaning on a wooden cane and sitting on her shaded porch.
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