From outside on the dirt street, the wailing was like a beacon of grief, arcing across the cloudless, star-lit night. Inside, a dozen women clad in full-length black cloaks sat huddled on the floor of a living room, bobbing back and forth and sending piercing high-pitched screams into the night. What they were weeping over lay next door, in the blue-painted anteroom decorated with a dusty picture of an alpine stream in Europe that people of this poor Shiite Muslim neighbourhood in northwestern Baghdad are unlikely to ever see.

COFFIN COUNT: Razzaq Kazem al-Khajaf lost 15 family members, including six children, to coalition bombardment in southern Babylon

Under the orange glow of a single kerosene lamp, three rough-hewn wooden caskets lay neatly in line on the floor of the waiting room. Inside the caskets were the bodies of the boys of the al-Hamdani family, ages 20, 18 and 12, wrapped in white sheets and tied in bows at the knees, waist and chest with scraps of matching white cloth.

Neighbours said the boys were killed when a bomb or missile struck a crowded, open-air market about 50 ft away from their home. The crater gouged out of the hard dirt street wasn't large-3 m wide and 2 m deep-but hot shrapnel peeling from the ordnance hit two of the boys in the chest and one in the head, killing them instantly, the neighbours said.

The boys of the al-Hamdani family weren't alone. Officials at the nearby al-Noor Hospital said up to 51 people were killed and 50 wounded in the weekend blast in Baghdad's al-Shu'la district. The civilian death toll in Iraq continues to rise and predictably so do the questions about the war aims of Washington and London.

The modest crater appeared more consistent with the signature of an Iraqi surface-to-surface missile. That didn't matter. The explosion was immediately blamed on a US bomb or missile that no one here described as "errant." Both ordinary Iraqis and officials alike say the United States and Britain, frustrated with their progress in the war, have deliberately taken the fight to Iraq's civilians.

Salama Zaki al-Said is one of those Iraqis and, civilian or not, he has grown increasingly sure that Iraq would prevail as its war with the US and Britain entered its third week. He confidently ventured from his home on the Muslim day of prayer and was shopping for a television in al-Shu'la's market when he heard jets high overhead and looked up in the sky. Seconds later, he said, a blast shook the street, demolishing shop stalls and ripping gaping holes in a parked red Volkswagen sedan.

"I was stunned," he said. "I couldn't believe it would happen here." A few feet away, the father of the three dead boys stood stiffly, as if in daze, while the weeping swirled around him. He would not speak.

PROPAGANDA WAR: Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf plays on the media's need for gore and emotion; (below) an Iraqi runs past a car destroyed in a Baghdad raid

Shiite Muslims make up about 70 per cent of Iraq's 24 million people, but they have been the downtrodden majority under Saddam Hussein's regime, getting the short end of the stick in favour of the Sunni Muslim minority and the Iraqi leader's tribe belonging to the north.

Bush Administration officials had hoped the US-led invasion of Iraq would trigger anti-government rebellions in Shiite neighbourhoods like al-Shu'la, but so far none has broken out. Incidents like this blast will do little to boost American hopes.

Asked about the nature of the injuries he had been treating, Dr Ahmed Sufian, a resident at Al-Noor Hospital, grew increasingly distraught. They were "severe", he repeated, then described a one-year-old girl with open intestinal wounds. Finally, he could contain himself no longer and the condemnation of America poured forth. "I'm a doctor and I can't understand this. They come to free us? This is freedom?"

It has become increasingly difficult in Baghdad for foreign reporters to answer the doctor's question, let alone ferret out who is responsible for the mounting toll of civilian casualties.

There are only about 300 foreign reporters remaining in Baghdad, and rather than risk expulsion we have become obedient participants in what one reporter has dubbed the "magical mystery tour" after the Beatles' recording of the same name. Actually, the Iraqi Government's daily bus excursions for journalists spark very little magic and more than a few mysteries. The name has stuck, though.

Each day, three or four 45-seat buses pull up to the front of the Palestine Hotel, which houses all foreign reporters in Baghdad. Journalists trundle aboard for the trips to sites of bombings against purportedly civilian targets that the Iraqi Government says were committed by US and British forces.

The Palestine Hotel where all foreign journalists are housed

When the buses stop, reporters pour out and scurry toward the demolished building to find a quote, while photographers and television cameramen search for a fresh angle in what has become for the Iraqis a one-note story: the deliberate targeting of civilians and non-military installations by "hysterical" American and British forces frustrated with their lack of progress in ousting Saddam's Government. This is a government that at the moment is "on-message," as they say in the public-relations game.

The media-saavy Iraqi authorities know that the appetite for news from Baghdad is voracious. They also know that journalism's lowest common denominator is gore and red-hot emotion.

One day last week, 10 photographers and television cameras and government chaperones circled the small remnants of a missile that rested on the curb in front of the destroyed al-Salhiya telephone exchange in central Baghdad. A Japanese photographer pulled a miniature Geiger counter from his bag and took readings from the shard of metal to determine if it contained uranium.

Then like impatient shepherds herding cattle, a government chaperone yelled at reporters in cryptic English, "Move. You will be happy. There's a lot of damage at the next stop."

There was. And sitting in the rubble of the Adamiyah telephone exchange was 70-year-old Abel Rashid Asen, smoking a cigarette and shouting, "We will sacrifice for Saddam Hussein. If Bush is a brave man, let him fight us face-to-face in Baghdad." The cameras and notebook-toting reporters lapped it up.

The "magical mystery tour" is only part of the new regimen for Baghdad reporters. At the Palestine Hotel, now also the office for the foreign press corps after the bombing of the Information Ministry, reporters are treated to a procession of government officials who tout Iraqi battlefield successes and spout ritual denunciations of alleged American and British excesses.

INNOCENT VICTIMS: A father holds his injured child in a Baghdad hospital

Over the weekend, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf condemned the killing of a defenceless Iraqi woman by the American "assassins" and "mercenaries". Al-Sahhaf failed to mention reports that indicated the woman was being used as a human shield by an Iraqi fighter.

As the war intensifies, controls on journalists have tightened. Under the new rules, reporters must have a government-approved minder and driver. Reporters are not permitted to travel in Baghdad without them. Want to walk alone to the corner to shop for groceries or go to a restaurant to eat? Forget it. Take a government chaperone. Even drivers are reminded of their duty to prevent reporters, especially Americans, from straying.

What has complicated coverage of this war further is the Iraqi Government's outright admission that it will use any subterfuge to defend the nation.

"We reserve the right to cheat the enemy. They are invading our country," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told one interviewer recently.

The impresario overseeing foreign journalists in Baghdad is the urbane and avuncular Uday al-Ta'e, the Information Ministry's director-general. In setting down the new guidelines for foreign journalists on March 29 evening, al-Ta'e addressed every questioner, both male and female, with a feline "dear".

The regulations are for your own good, al-Ta'e told reporters. "We use 'guides' not 'minders'... They will solve your problems, wherever you go."

The director-general assured the gathered press corps that Iraq was interested only in the truth business, rejecting its opposite with a scowl as though he had smelled a rotten onion. "We don't sell propaganda. We hate propaganda. We don't need propaganda," he said.

Given these restrictions, the sceptic might well ask whether foreign reporters still in Baghdad are merely shills for the Iraqi Government. The answer is that while some might well be, most are not.

On the critical issue of civilian casualties, for instance, journalists are not experts in munitions. Few have served in the military. Yet among some foreign journalists still in Baghdad are reporters who between them have covered every major armed conflict of the past 40 years. Cluster bombs, Tomahawk cruise missiles and Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles leave distinct signatures in buildings, asphalt and flesh. That is a basis for scepticism about the customary claims of innocence made by both sides in this war.

Even with tight government control around the locations of alleged civilian casualties, there are stories to be told and hints of important truths about Saddam Hussein and his grip on power. There was the doctor in the al-Noor Hospital who, frustrated by his inability to treat the victims from the al-Shu'la blast, admitted the hospital had no supplies and had been forced to conduct amputations without anaesthesia.

Then, back in the neighbourhood where the blast that killed 51 people occurred, there was a notable absence of pro-Saddam demonstrations that have been typical at every other blast site. These were Shiite Muslims who had benefited little from Saddam's rule yet were suffering just the same.

Even al-Ta'e slips up, tellingly describing the al-Shu'la blast as an "accident, an incident, a crime", all in the same sentence.

There are, of course, outright lies by Iraqi officials. Mostly, however, we work in a crucible of half-truths. Even al-Ta'e offered one unvarnished truth about the predicament of journalists in Baghdad.

"This is war. This is not tourism. This is not a picnic."