The Iraqis' Stories: For young Sunnis, a grim existence

For the first time in more than a month, 19-year-old Mustafa al-Adhami ventured out of his home recently in his hardscrabble neighborhood, looking for a haircut.

As he and a friend walked to a nearby barbershop in the predominantly Sunni section of western Baghdad, they came upon the corpse of a young man they later learned had been dumped on the street a few hours earlier.

"The body was covered with a piece of cardboard, so my friend pushed it away a little to see if it was anyone we knew, but it wasn't anyone we could recognize," said al-Adhami, who rarely leaves home these days. "For Sunnis in Iraq, our destiny holds only two options: We either find a way to leave this country or we will be killed."

With that dire outlook, al-Adhami has become part of a growing population of young people who are living solitary lives as a result of the intractable violence plaguing the capital. As grisly insurgent bombings and sectarian killings keep mounting, many in Baghdad's younger generation wonder whether they are watching their youth slip away to a protracted war.

The ice cream shops, once a popular place for young men and women to discreetly check each other out, now shutter at sundown. The social clubs in tonier parts of Baghdad, where young people with the means would while away their Friday afternoons, are empty. And the shawarma joints near al-Adhami's university, once busy after-school hangouts, are desolate.

"Our lives have become lonely," al-Adhami said.

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