BAGHDAD — Thirteen-year-old Mohammed Khalaf and his younger brother Ahmed had taken a break from their soccer game to collect candy from American soldiers when a suicide bomber turned his SUV onto the boys' narrow street.

Tires screeching, the vehicle sped toward the children at the end of the block. In an instant, there was a massive explosion and 28 people were dead. Among them was Ahmed, whose body was ripped open in front of his older brother.

Mohammed hasn't recovered since that terrible July morning, said his father, Ali Dalil Khalaf, putting a protective arm around the silent boy with large, searching brown eyes.

Mohammed has become another young witness to the daily violence, and his father another adult burdened with loss and the task of explaining new horrors and hatreds to the children of Iraq.

Across the capital, parents, teachers and others now speak of protecting children not just from bombs, but from the war games youngsters play on the streets and the prejudices stoked by the mounting sectarian violence. Adults wish they could heal the psychological scars of growing up in a place where every passing car could be lethal.

"It's a hard time to be a parent," said Fawzi Haloob Sahi, who lives across the street from the Khalafs in the largely poor, Shiite Muslim neighborhood known as Jadida. He lost his 17-year-old son in the bombing and has no money to treat his youngest boy, whose right hand was mangled in the attack.

Raising children in Baghdad hasn't been easy for a long time. For a dozen years leading up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, families struggled to eke out a living as the country buckled under the weight of United Nations sanctions.

But since the fall of Hussein 2 1/2 years ago, the bombings, the executions and the rising sectarian tensions have exacted a new toll, many Iraqis say.

"Children are growing afraid to interact with other children. They are afraid of relationships," Mohammed said. "This generation, when it grows up, will create an unstable, weak society….[They] will curse us for what we have wrought in Iraq."

At Al Huda School in Karada, a mostly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, Principal Najiha Mahdi Mohammed Hadi said she was seeing things she had never seen in her 32 years at the secondary school for girls.

Hadi said students had begun talking about who was a Shiite and who was a Sunni. This year, there have been several fights between girls from different religious sects, she said.

"We never thought of distinctions before," the 60-year-old principal said, shaking her head sadly in her sweltering first-floor office. "This idea just appeared."

Outside, in a hallway where a group of girls was catching up on chemistry because it was too hot to study in the classrooms, teacher Suad Makiya vented her frustration at the persistent talk among Iraqis about the forces dividing them.

A few yards away, under the shade of an oleander bush, 17-year-old Nawras Salah said she and other Sunnis did not distinguish between religious sects. "But Shiites do," Nawras said. "They talk about us not going to the Muslim holy sites and complain because Saddam was a Sunni."

Hadi and other teachers at the dilapidated schoolhouse off one of Baghdad's main boulevards say they have tried to quash the prejudices by stressing tolerance and unity. The school held several special assemblies to discuss the issue, Hadi said.

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