THE arrival of the firstborn is usually marked in the Arab world by a gathering of the extended family to celebrate. But when Rasha Sebai’s son is born this summer, there will be no jubilant visitors, no gifts of gold and jewellery, no sweets to be handed out along the street.

Rasha, 22, has lost Ali, her businessman husband, her mother, father, brother and two uncles to Iraq’s death squads and yearns to die in childbirth.

When she tried to flee to neighbouring Jordan, where her sister was waiting to comfort her, she was refused entry as an undesirable with no spouse, income or prospects despite her affluent middle-class background. She was reduced to asking inlaws in Syria to take her in.

Isolated, lonely and frightened of what the future may hold, she pours out her anguish to her sister Huda, 33, on the telephone day and night.

“I long to die in labour,” she laments, over and over again. “I cannot live alone like this. I want to join Ali and Mama.”

She begs Huda, now exiled in Amman, to make the three-hour journey to Damascus when the birth is due and take the place of her mother, who would have been present to soothe and encourage her had she not been kidnapped and killed in a particularly cruel fashion.

“Please promise me you will come and be by my side when I deliver my baby,” Rasha cries. “Promise me you’ll be there as mama would have been in my hour of need.”

Huda promises she will not let her down. But although she wants to hold her sister’s hand, she knows that if she leaves Jordan, where her visa has to be extended each week, she may never be allowed to return.

The thought of Rasha giving birth without any woman from her family present and with no husband causes Huda intolerable anguish.

“Rasha has no one left except me. No mother, father, brother or husband who will look with pride and pleasure at their firstborn,” she sobbed last week. “What should be her happiest day is going to be a sad and lonely one for us all.”

The Sebai family’s harrowing story reflects the barbarity of the death squads and the suffering they have inflicted on countless others during an onslaught which has persisted for more than a year in Baghdad and which now seems to be intensifying again after a short lull.

Thousands have been taken from their homes and work-places or simply snatched off the street and driven away to their fate. The bodies that turn up eventually in ditches, waste ground and rubbish dumps bear witness to the horror of their last moments: hands often bound, holes sometimes drilled in limbs and bullet wounds to the head.

The speed with which the Sunni Sebai family was destroyed once it had been targeted by the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian-backed Shi’ite cleric, proved overwhelming.

For Rasha and Huda, a surge of American and Iraqi troops into the capital over the past eight weeks to crack down on the men of violence means nothing. The leader of the death squad that killed their loved ones vanished briefly to Tehran but has returned, they say. According to their former neighbours, his men are living openly in the Sebais’ properties, running their businesses and driving their cars.

The civilian body count is up, too. It rose from 1,646 in February to 1,869 in March. The number of unidentified bodies dumped around Baghdad fell to three a day when the crackdown began. It now averages 19 a day. It is all in bitter contrast to the freedoms the Sebai sisters envisaged when Saddam Hussein’s regime was ousted in 2003.

Life was hard under his rule. But they received a sound education, their mother Aisha built up a chain of supermarkets and their father Nuri enjoyed the respect commanded by a retired army officer with a decent pension. For the first two years after the fall of Saddam, life improved. But the sectarian strife of the past two years has robbed them of all they held dear.

“All we wanted in life was to bring our children up and not be in need of anyone,” Huda said. “All that is now gone — taken away in a split second like a bad, bad dream.”

The nightmare began on October 30 when several cars packed with Mahdi militiamen arrived at the family home in al-Jadida, a mainly Shi’ite district of southeast Baghdad. Aisha, 56, was alone that afternoon.

The Mahdi men were angry that Nuri, 59, had opened a Sunni mosque to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast a day before the Shi’ites marked the occasion.

“They considered this a challenge,” Huda explained. She was told later that the Mahdi army had decided to punish the family by killing 10 of its men.

Aisha was kidnapped to lure the first of the men to their deaths, she said. A neighbour who was related to a local Mahdi imam told the family that Aisha was being held for interrogation. The imam was demanding a written character reference, the neighbour claimed. He mentioned a house of worship to which he said it could be delivered.

Aisha’s brother Abed, 45, and youngest son Walid, 19, set off for the address in the belief that they could help to free her. With them was Abed’s 10-year-old son, Mustafa.

When they arrived, two Mahdi army gunmen were waiting. The boy was allowed to run away as the others were dragged to a pickup truck to be driven away.

The same message had gone to Aisha’s husband, who set off to save her without knowing that the others had gone ahead of him. According to witnesses, he was bundled into the boot of a car but escaped as it began to move.

“We were told that he ran from the vehicle towards some nearby houses, seeking help, but was pursued by the militiamen, who opened fire and killed him with more than 25 bullets only 400 metres away from a police checkpoint,” said Huda.

“We began calling my father’s mobile phone but there was no response. Later in the day his phone was answered by police who told us he’d been killed.”

The other men were found dumped nearby the following day. Both had been shot execution-style with their hands tied behind the back. They appeared to have been tortured with electric drills.

The sisters’ grieving was compounded with daily visits to the mortuary in search of their mother. Flicking through photographs of the bodies taken there, they finally saw her picture on November 20, three weeks after her disappearance.

“My dead mother’s face was staring me in the eye,” Huda said. “Her head was all bloodied as if she’d been hit on it and then shot.”

Worse still, she learnt that the body had been delivered to the morgue just hours after she vanished — on the day before the three men of the family had tried to rescue her.

Not only that, but because her body had been held for more than two weeks, it had been given to a grave digger who had buried her far away in the southern holy city of Najaf with the serial number 222. It took 30 days and $1,500 (about £750) to retrieve her and ensure that she could be reburied alongside her husband in their northern home town of Mosul.

The Arab Mother’s Day, March 21, was filled with pain for her daughters. “She was our security, our strength,” said Huda. “Now I feel broken.”

At least Huda, her husband and two children had left for Jordan after the burial. Rasha remained in Iraq beside her husband Ali who, as eldest son, was responsible for running the family’s property business.

They moved to a different district as a precaution but on January 14, Ali received a call from an old neighbour summoning him to his mother’s house to meet some men who wanted to rent one of their properties.

He found his mother and sister being held hostage by Mahdi militiamen and handed himself over in exchange for the women’s release. He was found tortured and decapitated that afternoon.

On the same day, an uncle of Rasha and Huda was tied to an electricity pole and shot by militiamen who appeared to have used him for target practice. He was the sixth member of the family to die.

Rasha fled, distraught, to the lonely existence she endures in Damascus as she awaits the arrival of her firstborn.

“Losing one loved one is bad enough. Losing six, including a husband who was beheaded, is unbearable,” she tells her sister.

The first anniversary of her wedding falls next week but she can barely remember the lovely day when Ali shared with her his dreams of a joyful future.

Al-Qaeda blamed for chlorine bomb

A suicide chlorine bombing in the western city of Ramadi, which killed 12 and injured 43 including five children, was blamed by the US military yesterday on Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The bombing, in which a lorry loaded with TNT and toxic gas was rammed into a police checkpoint, was the ninth such incident since the campaign of chlorine attacks began in January.

US commanders are convinced that Friday’s bombing had the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda. It left many onlookers with severe breathing difficulties. Chlorine, used on first world war battlefields, can be fatal in higher concentrations.

In a statement the military said the lorry ignored warnings to slow when approaching the checkpoint. It exploded after police fired at it.