Footnote to the preceding

One group often persecuted and just as often forgotten has also found life difficult in "liberated" Iraq: gypsies.

Sagban greets visitors amid the looted buildings of what used to be Iraq's National Security College, his home ever since irate neighbors ran him and his gypsy relatives out of their previous village.

A "bamb" or pimp for this encampment west of Baghdad, Sagban – like many Iraqi gypsies – makes a living through prostitution as well as supplying music and dancers for celebrations and parties.

But he and his relatives have found it difficult to support themselves through their traditional occupations since being expelled from their former village. ...

[S]oon after the collapse of the old regime, residents ran the gypsies out of the village.

"We decided to get rid of them because we are Muslims, and we refuse to let them live close to our families," recalled one local taxi driver. "We destroyed their houses with bulldozers. When some of them resisted, we killed them."

The gypsies said six of their neighbours were killed in the attack. ...

The gypsy community at Abu Ghraib was not the only one to be attacked.

In February, followers of radical Shia preacher Muqtada al-Sadr assaulted the gypsy settlement of Fawar near the southern town of Diwaniya, accusing its inhabitants of kidnapping a local girl.

The gypsies fled after fighting in which several of them were injured and a Sadrist reportedly killed. The village was ransacked.

Some of the women resent their role as prostitutes.

"Why am I here?" asked Nur, a prostitute in her mid-twenties from a gypsy settlement near the eastern Iraqi town of Showmely ...

"Why are we condemned to such a humiliating occupation?" she asked. "We live primitive lives and don't go to school. All we do is to satisfy others sexually, without any sense of passion."

Indeed. But somehow, driving gypsies from their homes, killing them, despising them even as you make use of their "services," doesn't seem likely to change that.