BAGHDAD–In 2003, when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, a woman named Hamdiyah al-Dulaimi had three handsome sons. They had grown into good men with wives and families. They were the shining accomplishments of her life.

In hindsight, it was a much better life than she realized at the time. Most certainly better than it is now, four years after the fall of Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the people of the city cheered invading U.S. soldiers in the city square. Leaders of the coalition troops promised liberty, freedom and life without tyranny.

But Baghdad still has none of those things. And al-Dulaimi has no sons.

One day last spring, a dozen men in black uniforms knocked down her door with machine guns. They screamed "Filthy Sunnis!" and they handcuffed her sons: Haqqi, 39, Qais, 37, Ali, 31.

"Why? What did my boys do?" the mother cried. She got no answers. The dozen gunmen dragged their new prisoners across the floor, pummelling heads with their rifle butts.

Al-Dulaimi dropped to her knees, clinging to the ankles of a kidnapper. She begged, kissing his shoes. Then she bargained: "At least leave me one. Take the other two. Leave me one.''

They beat her head with their gunstocks until she passed out. Then they took her sons.

The next day, their corpses were on the sidewalk. Haqqi's body was headless. The bodies of Qais and Ali had been mutilated; some parts were missing.

Like so many others, their grieving mother fled – to Syria, in her case. She left behind deprivation and corruption, mayhem and madness; a city that is hemorrhaging many of its best and brightest, while many of those left behind are brutalized and traumatized.

Not withstanding the well-publicized stroll by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain last week – "Things are better," he insisted – Iraqis wonder: Can a place where men blow themselves up in street markets, cars implode at traffic lights and kidnappings occur in broad daylight ever recover?

There is a way out, say historians and sociologists.

South Africa went on, after the horrors of apartheid, in large part because of reconciliation hearings headed by Nobel-prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who gathered victims and perpetrators in the 1990s and led them through extraordinary meetings of shared memories that led to forgiveness.

In the same way, Rwanda tried to reach beyond the machetes that hacked to death 800,000 Tutsis, putting the Hutus who wielded them in the same room with their victims' families.

Such methods take years, and nothing can be done until the fighting stops.

"It's one of those terrible situations where you are at first aghast that such things could happen," said Jack Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia, who specializes in international conflict. "And then you realize that people are people and they've been doing this kind of thing forever and it's not the end of the world. People do go on.''

But, "for any of this to occur, there has to be a settlement that provides security for the people of Iraq," he cautioned. "And we're a long way from that.''

Baghdad's brain drain

Gone missing are the simple things that feed body and soul: drinkable water that flows from a tap, electricity that stays on, movie theatres that open, booksellers with new books.

Also missing are an ever-growing number of doctors, professors and teachers – "the brain of Baghdad," as the Iraqis say.

There is no official record of the number of professionals who have fled. There are only anecdotes – an Iraqi doctor now living in Jordan who says 80 per cent of his colleagues ran for their lives, based on what he saw at his hospital. An architect in Baghdad who must now work at home, who says 30 per cent of her fellow designers are gone.

Dr. Haidr al-Maliki, a specialist in child psychology, is a guarded but compassionate man. For him, leaving Iraq is not an option.

"If I leave and all the other doctors leave, all the hospitals would be closed," he said. "We have to take care of our people. Death can come in any country.''

It has already come calling for al-Maliki, but the visit was unsuccessful. A 16-year-old, "fine looking boy" walked into his clinic in 2005 and asked, "Are you Dr. Haidr?''

"Yes," said al-Maliki. With that, the teenager produced a pistol and opened fire. The doctor dove under his desk; he was shot twice, in the hand and shoulder.

He said the attack was part of an insurgent campaign against doctors. Six others were attacked in the city, and four died.

The doctor never returned to his clinic. Instead, he now works out of a hospital in central Baghdad. The flashbacks he suffers from the shooting are horrible, he says, but sometimes they help him empathize with his young patients, who are more traumatized than their parents.

There is the 16-year-old girl who was abducted in February outside her school in a Sunni neighbourhood. She was beaten and kept in a room for nine days with about 20 other kidnapped girls. She was forced to sleep next to the corpse of another victim, a girl who was killed when her parents couldn't pay.

The parents of al-Maliki's patient paid $20,000 – the going rate in ransom negotiations – for her safe return. She is seriously damaged – terrified of darkness and the nightmares that come with sleep; hostile and aggressive when she is awake.

There are the sister and brother haunted by the recurring images of gunmen who invaded their house, tied up their parents, and beat them before their eyes. The children cannot function at school and now remain at home.

There is little that al-Maliki can do except listen and offer words of calm comfort.

1.7 million have fled

Faiza al-Arji last visited Baghdad in November. She stayed for a week. She had planned to stay longer, but her friends begged her to leave. It's too dangerous, they said. Maybe someone will shoot you. Maybe there will be a bomb in the road. Who knows where death comes from?

But she remembers a night when she and her friends had gathered for dinner. There was laughter at the table. Al-Arji could not join in. She couldn't even eat. She sat there, bewildered by the revelry, astonished that her friends could make light of such darkness.

"Faiza, relax," they told her. "It's okay to have fun. We have to go on. We cannot give up.''

Al-Arji gave up on life in Baghdad long ago. She now lives in Jordan, which has become home to roughly 700,000 Iraqi refugees – a staggering number in a small country of 5.6 million. Another estimated 1 million are scattered in Syria, Lebanon and other countries.

Al-Arji is lucky. She and her husband have money and can afford to live in the expensive city of Amman. Both are civil engineers. They left in 2005, even though she vowed after the invasion that she would never leave.

She endured having guns shoved in her face and her car stolen. She reported it to the Iraqi police, who said, "My sister, I understand. But what can I do? The police are weak.''

But when one of her three grown sons was kidnapped, that was the end. He was abducted by security guards at his university, who considered him a terrorist because "he had a beard on his face,'' said his mother. The kidnappers demanded $20,000. Her husband paid it. They fled.

Still, she maintains her ties to her homeland. She works with aid agencies, navigating a rabbit warren of bureaucracy and logistics, sending water filtration kits to hospitals in Iraq. She often hears horror stories from loved ones left behind.

An aunt was standing in her garden last year. A missile fell, and she was killed. A neighbour was standing outside his door when a roadside bomb erupted.

Just the other day, she spoke to her sister in Baghdad. On the walls of the houses on her street, someone had scrawled, "All Shia must leave."

Her sister wasted no time. The family abandoned their house and most of their belongings. They are staying with friends in another neighbourhood, hoping the invaders will someday leave.

"It is hell," al-Arji said. "It is a war zone. It is not a city any more.''

She cannot understand the insurgents. "Who are these people?'' she cries on the phone from her home in Amman. "Who is funding them? How can they do this?''

They are simple questions with no answers, sensible thoughts for an insensible city.

"You can't walk in the street. You can't go to buy a book. Everything has been cancelled. They have lost the meaning of life.''