She lives on 101 Street in the Tanawin district of the capital. Her front door opens onto a room whose walls are blackened by the oil stove that doubles as a cooker and a source of warmth.

Sitting on a bench against the wall, Khalida's 70-year-old uncle Yacoub Yusef is bemused by this sudden intrusion of the foreign press. Her younger sister retreats to her room, terrified by the photographers' clicking cameras.

This Jewish family is one of the few left in a country where their community once numbered more than 100,000.

The Jewish presence in Mesopotamia dates back to around 600 BC, when 10,000 Jews were taken into captivity by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, after he conquered the kingdom of Judah, and 100,000 Jews were living in Iraq before the creation of Israel in 1948.

Ninety percent of those left Iraq for Israel after 1948, escaping via Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, while others transited via the Netherlands on Dutch visas.

Old Yacoub explains that he is a retired shopkeeper who had a store in the Shurja district of central Baghdad.

"Look, it's the name of God in Hebrew," says 38-year-old Khalida, pointing at a painting on the wall whose cleanliness is in stark contrast to the rest of the room.

An indefinable stew bubbles on the stove and the mistress of the house busies herself with the cooking. As she speaks the sound of clucking chickens drifts in from the backyard.

"We have freedom of movement and Saddam gave each of us 40,000 dinardollars) a month and we also got rations," she says.

It is difficult to know if she is simply repeating stock phrases she needed to trot out to avoid persecution when Saddam Hussein still ran the show in Iraq and fashioned himself as Israel's most vociferous foe.

Israeli premier Ariel Sharon this week offered Khalida and her co-religionists in Iraq the chance to emigrate to Israel, in a letter to them for the Jewish festival of Passover, which celebrates the Jewish exodus from Egypt and the Israelites' liberation from slavery.

"No, I can't leave, I want to die in Iraq, it's my country," she replies when asked if she would like to emigrate.

Khalida and her uncle say they stopped going to the nearby synagogue a few years ago, after the last rabbi died.

Yakoub says the last members of his family left Iraq in the 1990s for Britain and the Netherlands and that he has lost all contact with them because of poor communications.

His Christian neighbours on 101 Street say they've always had good relations with the Jewish family.

"We've never had problems with them, not once since they moved in 13 years ago," says Umm Nabil, whose house lies across the road.

"You might even say they were better off than us, because they got help from their synagogue as well as their rations," she adds.

Another resident Umm Hikmat, a Muslim, says she didn't know her neighbours were Jews until a couple of years ago.

"We say hello but we never realy get involved in each others' business," she adds.

Mahdi Saleh, who was employed by the now defunct regime to handle the administrative affairs of Iraq's Jewish community, said that it was 460-strong when he started his job 15 years ago.

"Today there are only about 50 left. Some left the country, others died," he says.

Saleh admits that Saddam's security services "kept a very close eye on the Jews."

The last Jewish school in Baghdad has now closed for lack of pupils, and the former commmunity leaders -- among them doctors, engineers and businessmen -- have died one by one, he adds.

SPACE.WIRE