A Mother’s Letter From Baghdad : Bombing: She tells of the misery and hardships inflicted by the raids. The note was hand-carried out and mailed to her daughter, an Iraqi student in Palos Verdes.

Just as President Bush was announcing a halt to the hostilities in the Persian Gulf, an Iraqi student found in her Palos Verdes mailbox a letter that her mother had sent from Baghdad on Saturday describing her family’s trials through nearly six weeks of war.

The letter, received on Wednesday, was the only such communication that Iraqi-American groups know of that has arrived in the United States since the war began.

Mail service between the two countries was severed not long after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2. Telephone communications were cut when the war started in January, leaving a quarter-million Iraqi-Americans without news of their families.

“I am the lucky one,” said Zainab Rasheed, 21, who last spoke to her mother the night before the war started. “At least I have faith my family is alive. . . . But the news is not good. Before, I could not stop crying because I did not know whether I would ever see them again. Now, I cannot stop crying because I know they are not all right.”

The letter was entrusted by her mother to a British citizen driving to Jordan. When he arrived home in London, he mailed the letter to a relative in Chicago, who sent it to Palos Verdes Estates, where Rasheed, who was spending a semester studying in Los Angeles, is staying with an uncle.

The letter describes the plight of Rasheed’s father, a retired airline executive, and her mother, a former high school science teacher. The family home is in Baghdad’s once-modern al-Mansour neighborhood. Rasheed, whose two brothers also are in Iraq, asked that her parents’ names not be used.

The letter reads, in part:

My lovely daughter:

I wish I could see you now and kiss you. You are the light of my life. What a misery we are in. We thank God that, to this day (Saturday), we are safe. Perhaps somehow, the best can come of things that are the hardest for us to bear.

Thank God you are not here. We do not wish for God to show the face of this misery to anyone else. I worry and cry continuously. I don’t know what the future bears for us. But you know me; I always worry about everything.

There were other ways; it is so sad there had to be war.

I last talked to you on the 15th. On the 16th , the bombing began.

We left Baghdad for a Al Khalis (a town about 60 miles from Baghdad) to stay with a relative of a relative. The room was very, very cold--like ice. We had the radio on all night. Then, because that home was full of people fleeing Baghdad, we left and stayed in an abandoned building.

There was no toilet. The place was full of roaches and bugs. The smell was terrible, the smell of animal things. Dirty, filthy, rotten, smelly. We used the broom to sweep away the human waste. It was dark, it was cold, but for a while we felt safe and free from the threat of the war. Then bombs fell around us there too.

We stayed one terrible week. I had a nervous breakdown and we came back to Baghdad. I prefer to die in my house than to live as we were. The war with Iran was nothing compared to this one.

Now we have been in Baghdad 10 days. Every morning and every evening the sky is full of fire. It looks like Star Wars: airplanes, jets, rockets, missiles. Every second the house shakes. We get used to the shaking, but not to the being afraid.

We are living back one full century now. At night we use the lantern. We forgot about the refrigerator. All signs of civilization have been forgotten. There is no electricity, no water, very very little gas, and no heating oil.

My daughter, please don’t worry. I ask you to remain strong, keep your ethics strong, and do whatever is right. You are a strong woman. Listen to your elders and heed their advice. Keep your self-respect. Hopefully God will reunite us again. Love to everyone in America.

In two days we are going to another town above Tikrit and below Al Mawsil. We do not know when we will return. God willing, we will see you again. We are proud of you.

Enclosed in the letter was a short note from Rasheed’s 11-year-old brother. He ended by saying, “My school is closed. The condition of our country is very very very sad.”

Rasheed said she worries that the letter barely mentioned her father and made no mention of her 17-year-old brother, whom she fears was drafted into the army.

On Thursday, she wrote a letter to her mother, asking permission to return to Iraq as soon as flights are restored.

“The last thing my mother told me on the telephone was that she wanted me here to know that at least one member of the family was safe,” she said. “But I just want to see my family again. My mother really is my best friend, and I am her only daughter. I just want to go home.”