FOR a brief moment last Thursday night the relentless burdens of life in Baghdad — the power cuts, food shortages, petrol queues and most of all the nagging ever-present fear of violent death — were lifted from Dr Walid al-Sultani.

Shaza, his 37-year-old wife, gave birth to a healthy boy named Jaafar and the couple gazed with joy at their first child.

The doctor’s euphoria soon gave way to anxiety, however — not only about the boy’s future in a city racked by sectarian conflict, but about the perilous routine journey home from hospital during curfew hours.

Walid, 40, said his farewells to mother and son and made his way cautiously back through the checkpoints to the harsh reality of his family’s everyday struggle for survival.

Life for this hard-working radiologist, as for so many of the city’s inhabitants, is now a constant battle against fear. The swearing in last month of a new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has yet to assuage it.

Neither a security crackdown launched by Maliki in Baghdad last week nor an amnesty he is expected to offer to insurgents today has generated any optimism that the violence will be halted soon.

The courage of ordinary citizens in the face of terror, and their quiet determination to get on with their lives, would humble any visitor from the West.

Life is far from easy for members of the professional classes, such as Walid and his wife, let alone for the poor.

For one thing, money is tight: Walid had to close his private clinic outside Baghdad because it simply became too dangerous to drive there. For another, there is what he calls “24-hour stress”.

“En route to work I am constantly afraid of explosions, car bombs or booby-traps, being kidnapped or murdered for being in the wrong profession or religious sect,” he said.

Shopping is a hurried weekly affair because “the fewer outings we make the safer we are”. “To fill my car with petrol will take more than three hours in a queue, so I buy on the black market, which is more expensive, less clean but quicker,” he said.

Walid counts himself lucky to be alive following kidnappings and murders among friends and colleagues. He recently received a death threat and does not believe that the much vaunted security clampdown will provide much protection.

After his wife’s delivery, he explained, he told the soldiers manning various checkpoints on his route home that he was a doctor and they just waved him through. “Not a single one of them asked me for my medical badge. I could have been anyone,” he said.

Deteriorating security in recent months has convinced many Iraqis that the best they can hope for is to survive each day without being blown to pieces.

Shatha Abbas, 35, is haunted by the death of her son Ali, 16, in a car bomb that went off as he opened his street kiosk early one morning last year.

“I wake up at 3am and sob my heart out remembering him,” said Shatha, who has six other children. “He was my eldest, my joy and the light of this house. Now he is gone.”

She has taken her two daughters, Dua’a and Russul, out of school. “I cannot bear the loss of another child,” she said. “If they were kidnapped, where would we get ransom money from, and if they were killed in an explosion, what would I do?”

Shatha’s bereavement also dominates the thoughts of her sister-in-law Siham Aboud, who lives in the same house but on the floor below. After Siham’s husband drives her sons Mehdi, 6, and Murtada, 9, to school, she spends the whole morning fretting as she prepares their lunch.

“What if they are killed by a bomb? Every time I hear a bang, or an explosion, I put on my abaya and run to the street expecting bad news,” she said.

She fears for her husband Hussein, a taxi driver who travels throughout Baghdad.

“I worry about him and begin to cry. What if he is caught? What if he is blown up? Every night when he returns home safely I kiss his hands with joy,” she said.

The Aboud family avoid watching television news, with its daily barrage of bloody images, but the younger children insist on falling asleep in their mother’s lap anyway: they are too afraid to sleep alone.

Security is not the only concern for the Aboud family. Hussein struggles to earn enough to feed it.

On a good day he may bring in as much as £10, but it is often much less. Meat is an all-but-forgotten luxury in the household, which gets by mainly on vegetable stews and rice.

Government figures show that food prices jumped by 26% last year, an inflation rate that has compounded the hardship endured by Kamil Hamed, 47, a father of five who lives with his wife, elderly mother, two unmarried sisters and his brother and family in one house. There are 13 in all under the one roof.

Hamed, a former army officer under Saddam Hussein, is unemployed. He tried to get a job as a guard in a school or at a mosque, but without success. He applied to enrol as a policeman but claims he was asked for £170 in bribes that he could not afford.

Hamed has also taken his daughter out of school rather than run the risk of going to and fro. The family scrapes together earnings of about £110 a month. “The children need clothes, presents and even doctors and we cannot afford any of that,” he said.

Social visits to friends and relatives have ceased, except when someone dies. “Nowadays there are many deaths,” Hamed said.

“In the past we had a life. Now we are told we have freedom and democracy, but we have not seen this so-called freedom. We are not even free to leave the confines of our homes for fear of being killed. What freedom is that?” The hopes of many Iraqi families for a better life under a democratically elected government have yet to be realised.

The relatively prosperous Walid who, with his newborn son, has a big stake in the future of Iraq, has decided to stay when he could flee. He is under no illusion, however, about the daunting problems facing his strife-torn country.

Asked how he assessed the prospects of peace, he struggled to reply positively. “Maybe in a few years we may see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Additional reporting: Ali Rifat