A year in Iraq

NASIRIYAH, Iraq -- Hussein Kasim, 22, sparkles with pride as he recalls that day almost a year ago when he fired his machine gun at advancing US troops in an ambush by hundreds of Fedayeen fighters that killed 15 Americans as they rolled into town.

"We only retreated when the Air Force came in and bombed the whole area, hitting every person and car that moved," Kasim recalled, waving at the battle site on the town's main bridge across the Euphrates. "We are Iraqi, and we are a strong people."

The bloody urban warfare in this decrepit Shi'ite riverbank city, whose pockmarked downtown still bears the scars of bullets and stray mortars, was the first real fight for the US-led coalition on the road to Baghdad.

A year after that battle, perhaps more than any other Iraqi city, Nasiriyah offers a glimpse of what is in store for the rest of the country when Iraqis turn their attention toward post-occupation independence.

Nasiriyah was home to guerrilla movements that fought Saddam Hussein's dictatorship; this culture of political activism helped put the city ahead of the curve in Iraq's tentative moves to democracy. But that tradition of armed resistance also is the one force that could derail the exciting progress here as Iraq moves closer to regaining sovereignty on June 30.

A city of half a million about 190 miles south of Baghdad, Nasiriyah straddles the Euphrates in the heart of Iraq's Shi'ite south. On the riverbank, mangy sheep eat piled garbage near a busted pipe spewing water. But the downtown has sprung to life. Dozens of political party offices jostle with new Internet cafes, bookstores, tea shops around central Haboobi Square, where -- unlike in Baghdad -- merchants stay open long after dark.

The city and the surrounding Dhi Qar Province have enthusiastically plunged forward in an experiment with democracy more advanced than most places in the country. Sixteen of 20 municipalities have had direct, peaceful elections for local councils.

Still, an undercurrent of violence runs through the region's bustling new political and economic life.

Armed Islamic militias killed three Iraqi police in a shootout last week, creating a crisis for local secular politicians as well as coalition officials. Street demonstrations orchestrated by clerics almost toppled the province's coalition-appointed governor in January.

At the same time, those once-dominant clerics have been losing ground in local ballots to secular political groups, led by the Communist Party. The votes to replace appointed councils have been taking place since October in towns across the province; the Nasiriyah city council election is scheduled for April.

Daily life for ordinary people has certainly improved compared with before the war. Basic services are dramatically better for the city's poor, who suffered some of the worst privation in Iraq as punishment for their resistance against the Hussein dictatorship.

Before the war, electricity often ran only two hours a day; now, the lights are on at least 22 hours a day.

Medical care at the city's enormous Saddam General Hospital was reserved for those few who could pay -- the Ba'athist elite. Now, health services at the renamed Nasiriyah General Hospital are free and open to all the city's residents.

Nearly three times as many patients are coming for treatment now as one year ago, according to the director, Dr. Abdul Martafee Ibrahim al-Jabbry. The hospital lacks adequate medical supplies and technical equipment, he said. "All the people of Nasiriyah get better medical services, but progress is step by step," he said.

Even crime, which skyrocketed last summer as it did across the country, has fallen to minimal levels. Now, residents walk without fear along the city's poorly-lit riverbank at night, past restaurants, half-finished structures, and bombed Ba'ath Party buildings converted into headquarters of previously banned political parties.

The militia problem These same political parties, however, might also pose the greatest threat to the blossoming democracy.

Religious parties stepped into the power vacuum created when the Ba'ath Party apparatus vanished overnight last April. They patrolled streets, arrested criminals, distributed food, opened schools. They also formed militias, armed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and, in some cases, mortars.

As a new Iraqi government has taken shape, the Islamic parties have been loath to give up their newfound power, especially their private armies.

In January, the coalition legalized an umbrella organization called the Citizens Security Group, absorbing fighters from nine Islamic parties in Nasiriyah to work alongside the provincial police force of more than 5,000 officers.

Instead of calming the situation, the move stoked tensions. The Islamic militias accuse the police of corruption and ignoring crime. The police say the militias have been taking their own prisoners, torturing them in the basements of party headquarters, and ignoring the laws giving sole law enforcement authority to the police -- an accusation confirmed by coalition officials.

"These political party militias, many of them are just criminal gangs," said Colonel Carmelo Burgio, commander of the Italian Carabinieri force that patrols Nasiriyah. Many fighters, he said, have been linked to carjacking, kidnapping, and robbery rings.

On March 9, police tried to enter the Citizens Security Group headquarters, a two-story, white riverfront complex newly refurbished by the coalition, to free two illegally detained prisoners. At midnight, the militia refused the police entry, and started shooting at the police across a residential waterfront neighborhood. Three police were killed and one was wounded before the Carabinieri intervened.

Wailing policemen were running into a storm of bullets to retrieve the bodies of their colleagues, Burgio said, while militia members fired indiscriminately at Iraqi police and Italian soldiers.

Using an armored vehicle for cover, the Carabinieri detonated several concrete roadblocks, retrieved the dead, and stormed the militia building, without firing a shot. They arrested nine militia members that night, and 13 more in the following days, in a continuing investigation.

"In this case, we prevented a massacre," Burgio said.

Several politicians in the province, including the governor and the Italian commander, have called for the militias to be shut down. The coalition is now weighing how to take the fangs out of the militias and fold them into the police without taking the politically explosive step of eliminating them altogether.

But Colonel Karim Abd Al Kudur, head of the Citizens Security Group, said that only his fighters can be trusted to keep order in Nasiriyah. The police, he claims, are mostly former Ba'athists: "I'm afraid of chaos if they try to disband us."

The provincial governor, Sabri Hamid Badir al-Rumidh, was almost forced out of office in January when the cleric who brokered his election turned against him and called supporters to demonstrate in front of the fortified library-turned-governor's office. Rumidh mounted a machine gun on the roof and summoned armed tribesmen to the city; clerics called off the demonstrations.

Rumidh, a technocrat fond of quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, thinks local elections in his province have been hasty, raising people's expectations before Iraqi politicians are prepared to meet them. He was appointed three months ago by the coalition.

Now, the official date of the handover to Iraqi self-rule looms on June 30. "Our political parties are irresponsible," Rumidh said. "I'm pessimistic" about the prospects for peace.

The interim police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Mohebel Khleef, put it more bluntly.

"If they don't disband the militias, there will be war here," he said, in his bunkerlike headquarters on the river, next to an Italian base. The guards are so jumpy they point loaded and cocked machine guns at every driver who approaches the entrance.

He admits there are also problems with the province's police officers. "Every day there are complaints, and I arrest or fine a police officer for corruption," he said.

Political life Police corruption is one of many problems a group of coalition officials, in tandem with Iraqis, exiles, and other foreigners, have been working to address.

Led by Tobin Bradley, a 29-year-old US State Department official fluent in Arabic, one team has gone town to town in the province since October, planning elections to replace coalition-appointed councils, which he called flawed but powerful. The new elected councils will be in charge of law enforcement and reconstruction, but have a poorly defined relationship with the coalition, which still has the final say until June 30.

Last Friday, Bradley was counting votes in a classroom at a technical school north of Nasiriyah, in an election with nearly 40 percent turnout.

"The challenge here is going to be whether these elected councils can produce," Bradley said.

The same day, the 250,000 residents of Shatra, a town just north of Nasiriyah, elected four communists and seven independents to a board of 15 to replace a coalition-appointed council. Islamic parties, which used to dominate the city council, lost their majority and slipped to just four seats in the elected body.

That secular surge was unexpected in a region where close to 99 percent of the population is Shi'ite Muslim and religious figures have unparalleled influence.

With a year to measure the effectiveness of clerics in politics, people are changing their minds, said Aleem Minahi, who left his limousine company in Chicago after 12 years in exile to work as director of the provincial reconstruction and development council, where he is in charge of configuring the appointed council that runs the city of Nasiriyah, his hometown.

"In the [appointed] provincial councils in June, most of the members of the council were religious leaders with turbans," he said. "When we held elections, they all lost to independent technocratic people. People don't want clerics running their cities."

Here, it is easy to tell who spent Hussein's rule opposing the Ba'athists by the number of family members killed by the regime -- a badge of honor that brings an unmistakable stamp of credibility.

Marsh Arabs, an ethnic group predominant in the rural south and a handful of cities, the largest of them Nasiriyah, ran the most sustained and effective guerrilla resistance against Hussein's regime from this city. The only two political opposition parties to survive during his regime, the secular Communist and Islamic Da'wa parties, boast deep roots here.

One longtime guerrilla fighter who has turned to politics is Salman Sharif Dafar, 35. He staked out Hussein's son Uday for six weeks before leading an assassination attempt in 1996 that paralyzed the heir apparent.

Dafar fled to Iran but his father and six brothers were killed. He now serves on the provincial council and plans to run for provincial or national office in December or January.

"We hate fighting, and we hate killing. We want to be politicians now, civil people," Dafar said. "Now, we could take revenge or power through violence, but we don't want to be like Saddam."

Fears for the future Burgio, the Italian colonel, fears the Islamic party militias are planning a civil war after the elections. "They only know how to use power the way they saw it used under Saddam," he said.

Dozens of interviews with residents in Nasiriyah from all walks of life a year after the US-led invasion showed broad optimism about their improving quality of life. But people also expressed an abiding fear that the nascent political process could turn ugly, especially if Islamic militias are competing with police for power on the street.

In a region where people have historically expressed their political convictions with firepower, the specter of civil war hangs heavily in the air.

"Now criminals are running around killing people with AK-47s in the name of politics," said Siaud Koly Abd al-Aali, 45, a technician at the state telephone company, sipping tea on a wooden bench in Haboobi Square. "We have all the rights we want, but no security."

A busy gun market thrives every morning in the middle of a dirt lane just three blocks from the street stalls where vendors peddle cheap carpets and video discs of tribal parties.

The most fervent hopes of Iraqis and coalition troops alike are pinned on a peaceful handover of power. Coupled with economic growth, they believe it will pacify those most tempted by militancy. They are also heartened by the vigorous political debate echoing on Nasiriyah's streets -- a harbinger, officials hope, of a political renewal for the Shi'ite majority and, by extension, all of Iraq.

Fouad Abbas, 23, owns a DVD store in downtown Nasiriyah. Wearing a stylish, black Lycra running suit, he discourses passionately about what he calls the clerical old guard -- "They act just like Saddam's thugs" -- but considers himself a fervent Shi'ite.

"We're caught in the middle in a power struggle," Abbas said. "Once we vote, I pray the secular parties win. Then we can start to build a government that's not corrupt."

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.

Tomorrow: Fresh US troops face a new kind of war in Baghdad, and Europeans reassess the Iraq war after Madrid.