Dozens of children, many only three or four years old, gather on both shoulders of the highway leading from the border with Kuwait to Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

They are dirty, barefoot and pathetically thin, many with their faces covered by flies, drinking water from puddles.

Many of them live in humble adobe houses along the road, with the humanitarian aide that was already late arriving in Iraq still far from reaching them.

As the days have passed, they have lost their fear of the tanks and the uniforms. In Safwan, near the southern port of Umm Qasr, little ones climb aboard armored vehicles, play with soldiers' anti-flak jackets and ask for sweets or water.

For the first time in many years, the roads of southern Iraq are filled with foreigners who speak a language the children try to imitate.

"Hello! Thank you!" they shout as tanks rumble past.

Others, speaking words learned perhaps from their own elders or from the soldiers, say "Bush good."

The children are not always alone.

Whole families wander aimlessly along the roads with their children and what little livestock they have. The roads are understandably chaotic, with local traffic sharing them with tanks and armored cars and with no one paying any attention to traffic rules.

Parents wave white flags, made of a scrap of cloth or plastic.

Some of them are coming from Basra, from which hundreds of people are fleeing intense combat between Iraqi militias inside the city and British troops surrounding it.

WAR.WIRE