In this neighbourhood, called Saddam City, theft hardly seems worth the effort since there is almost nothing to steal. People have little food, little water, few belongings, no electricity. They have, though, a ton of automatic weapons and just enough hope that they are willing to fire bullets at people, and they do. Saddam City has the highest concentration of poor people in Iraq, somewhere around 3 million souls who live little better than the sickly horses and donkeys that stand in the heat like statues under a sun that drills down mercilessly. The animals stand next to the steaming piles of garbage that line the wide strip of dirt that marks the neighbourhood’s borders. The residents here have been firing those rifles as they have had no hope for decades and they are not willing to lose the little they have gained with the arrival of the Americans. The people who live here are Shias, members of the Muslim sect that Saddam Hussein chose to weaken to make him appear stronger. ‘‘Saddam provided only enough food so we could survive to serve him,’’ said 60-year-old Fadhil Muhsin Al-Zurgani. ‘‘He made the dog hungry so it will follow him.’’ Saddam named this neighbourhood after himself. Residents shed the name of their neighbourhood soon after US forces drove the Iraqi military from the holes that still pocket the neighbourhood. The people here now refer to their neighbourhood as Sadr City, named after Shiite leader Md al-Sadr who was killed by the regime in the 1990s. Over the past week, gunmen have arrived here sometimes during the day and sometime at night, unseen. They fire at whatever moves. So men and boys patrolling the streets with Kalashnikovs have set up their own roadblocks using bricks or stones or whatever. They stop visitors at gunpoint to interrogate them about their intentions, where they live, why they are coming into their neighbourhood if they do not live here, because there is really no reason to enter if not to return to a crumbling mud-brick house, one sure to be filled with a dozen people living in no more than four rooms. ‘‘We have to fight with everything we have to defend our families,’’ said Sheik Russohh Al-Gharrawi, who has been using the scratchy amplifiers fixed atop his mosque to implore his followers to grab their rifles. He set the minimum age requirement for patrolling at 15 years old but many who carry Kalashnikovs strapped over their backs like school bags do not look like they are yet 12. With so much lawlessness and so many boys not old enough to shave but old enough to curl a finger around a trigger of a rifle that can kill a dozen people with one pull, it is possible that those who have been shot here meant no harm at all. (LAT-WP)
