Fearful Baghdadis Struggle to Get By With No Electricity, Little Water : Hardship: The Iraqi capital, target of allied missiles and bombs, has no phones, and its gas lines are long.

Two weeks of allied air attacks have turned life in Baghdad into a living hell.

Every day has become a battle for life’s most basic necessities. Every day brings fear of being killed or wounded by missiles or bombs.

There is no power. There is little water.

There is very little gasoline, so little that some motorists spend the night in front of gas stations, wrapped in blankets against the bitter cold, to get an early place in the line.

By the time gas stations open at 8 a.m., up to 400 cars are waiting their turn to buy the newly introduced ration of seven gallons for 15 days.

Gasoline sales resumed this week after a blanket nationwide halt.

“The most simple things, all the things one took for granted, no longer exist,” one Baghdad resident said. “Even shaving in the morning is almost impossible. Where do you get the water?”

Iraqi authorities this week introduced a system that provides for the two halves of the capital, bisected by the Tigris River, to take turns in getting three days’ supply of water.

The next three days are waterless and few Baghdadis have the containers to store enough water to last them through the week.

“Old habits die hard,” said another resident. “I still automatically flip the light switch when I get home. Nothing happens of course. I still turn the tap and expect water. Nothing.”

But perhaps the worst aspect of life under the allied bombs is fear and uncertainty--fear of dying or being maimed, fear of losing one’s child, husband or parent.

After the opening attack of the war, massive air strikes on Baghdad and targets throughout the country Jan. 17, a few local telephones still functioned.

Wave after wave of strikes have ended all that. Now not even ministries can communicate with each other.

“Bush said he had no dispute with the Iraqi people,” a resident of the capital said Friday. “It certainly looks different from Baghdad.”

So do U.S. statements that the air war is being waged exclusively against military targets.

On Friday, five cruise missiles crossed Baghdad from west to east and smashed into the city.

After the rockets swept past, correspondents were taken to two residential areas that had been hit and two hospitals where the wounded had been taken.

One building destroyed in the attack was near the American Embassy. There was no indication of anything of military significance in the vicinity--or near the other destroyed houses that correspondents were taken to see.

There were 11 wounded treated at two different hospitals. They included six children. One of them, aged 12, was hit by shrapnel that pierced his back and came to rest in his abdomen, according to physician Zaku Ghazi.

His young patient, he said, was on the verge of death.

Another doctor, Paul Bogossian, said he had treated several hundred wounded since the start of the war. About 50 had died.

Friday’s air strike began at 11 a.m. as a group of international correspondents visited what Iraqi officials say was an infant formula factory before a missile reduced it to a tangle of twisted steel girders and flattened walls.

According to Washington, the plant was, in fact, producing chemical weapons. Inside the building however, spilled milk powder, containers, signs such as “pasteurizing line” and stationery appeared to indicate that the plant was everything the Iraqis said it was.

Plant manager Adel Sarsam said the factory in Abu Ghreib, 10 miles west of Baghdad, had been the only one in Iraq to produce powdered instant formula.

One sheet of paper pulled out randomly from the rubble by correspondents referred to a “scientific conference for state establishments for milk production” in 1985.

Information Ministry officials said the plant was built by the French company Sodeteg under a contract signed in 1975. Work began in 1977.

According to a document produced by the ministry, an Iraqi delegation went to the United States on Aug. 2, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, to sign an initial agreement with the Wyeth company to operate the factory.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz released a letter to Third World foreign ministers in which he accused the United States of attempting to destroy Iraq rather than implement international law or defend U.N. legitimacy.

The Gulf War, the letter said, has now turned into a “fight for freedom and independence against the new colonial tendency of the American-Israeli alliance.”

This story was subject to Iraqi censorship.