By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

It's just a thin slice of the unseen fear behind the Baghdad bombs, those black billows exploding nightly on television. But even a brief glimpse into the lives of helpless, trappped children can open eyes to the reality of war.

"You can see fear in their faces," a Baghdad aid worker, Hatim George, said of the hundreds of orphaned, abandoned and severely disabled children caught in the shuddering heart of the city through night after night of American bombardment.

International relief officials got word from Baghdad on Friday, the day after the cruise missiles began slamming into the city, that food was growing short at four children's institutions in the central part of the capital. Two more children's homes had shortages in Karbala, a city to the south that came under U.S. attack over the weekend.

The homes, run by the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, house 900 children, from babies abandoned by their mothers to teenagers — some disabled by cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and other conditions, said Geoff Keele, a U.N. Children's Fund spokesman.

Some of the children were sent to live with extended families for the duration of the conflict, said Keele, who was evacuated from Baghdad with the rest of the UNICEF (news - web sites) international staff and is operating from Amman, Jordan.

But hundreds of children remain confined to the al-Elwiya, al-Rashad, al-Waziriya and Dar al-Hanan homes. They are dark, crowded but clean places where even in peacetime the boys and girls have little room to play, Keele said.

In the past few days, Iraqi UNICEF workers managed to transport food from UNICEF storage in Iraq (news - web sites) to all six institutions, delivering tinned meat, wheat, rice, high-protein biscuits and milk, Keele said. This supplemented meager Iraqi government rations.

Two UNICEF staff members, including George, the acting local director, visited the institutions over the weekend and described what it was like to live through the bombing raids.

"The children could hear the explosions from their rooms," George, an Iraqi, said by satellite telephone.

The childrens' homes suffered no damage — apparently because the U.S. military is focusing its devastating barrage on major government installations — but the bombing may cause psychological harm, George said.

"Some of the children appear to have been traumatized by the sounds of bombing going on outside," he said.

Institutional staff members stay at the homes 24 hours a day. "The staff are all very committed to the welfare of the children," George said.

But, "given the present circumstances," he said, the staff was worried that they cannot maintain adequate child-care standards much longer.