Life Under Muqtada: Inside Baghdad's Shiite Slums

Five years after a war allegedly launched to liberate Iraq's Shiite majority, American forces have been bombing Shiite neighborhoods in Basra and Baghdad while their snipers and tanks remain on the ground in places like Sadr City.

Iraq seems to have emerged from the worst phase of its civil war, but the victorious Shiite factions have turned their arms on one another in a fight over the spoils, battling for political power in advance of the upcoming provincial elections.

But as the Americans attempt to secure an agreement with the government of Nouri al Maliki to legalize the long-term presence of troops in Iraq, Muqtada al Sadr and his followers remain a formidable obstacle. Whether or not Sadr has been weakened by the clashes in Basra and Sadr City, marginalizing the Sadrists will be almost impossible, for they remain the only genuine mass movement in Iraq, with roots that long predate the fall of Saddam.

Until 2007 Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, cooperated with the Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Iranian-created Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), to purge Sunnis from Baghdad and Iraq. They were very effective, and their success is the best explanation for the decrease in violence.

There are fewer people dying today because there are fewer left to kill; Sunnis and Shiites now inhabit separate walled enclaves, run by warlords and militias who have consolidated their control after mixed neighborhoods were cleansed along sectarian lines.

Since April 2007, American forces have erected a series of concrete walls and checkpoints throughout the city to divide warring Sunnis and Shiites. Though these walls helped dampen sectarian violence, they may have bolstered sectarianism, isolating Iraqis from their neighbors and leaving them dependent on militias like the Mahdi Army for food, supplies and protection.

Last December a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansour district where I was staying, and we headed to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We passed by an old Iraqi air force base that had been taken over by squatters after the war; poor Shiites lived in makeshift homes constructed of whatever bits of brick, aluminum and even cow dung could be found.

Donkeys and other livestock sifted through mounds of rubbish, and sewage flooded the dirt roads. Barefoot children with matted hair ignored us as our car ponderously navigated a circuitous route to avoid certain checkpoints.

My friend, who is from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player: songs for the Mahdi Army. The singing was in praise of Muqtada al Sadr, and the men chanted that Muqtada had not left his home, that he preferred death to leaving Iraq; it had evidently been written in response to accusations Muqtada had fled to Iran for safety, which he had indeed done. My friend laughed: "Now we are the Mahdi Army!"

We drove past checkpoints manned by the new Sahwa, or "Awakening", militias. There are about 90,000 of them, but almost all are former Sunni insurgents now backed by the Americans to fight al Qa'eda. The guards at these checkpoints belonged to one of the few Shiite Awakening groups, which the Americans set up in an attempt to counter the influence of the Mahdi Army in the area. But the Awakening men wore masks to conceal their faces and avoid retaliation, and they were protected by Iraqi police who also manned the checkpoints.

When I visited Shaab and the neighboring Ur district in 2006 and 2007, I saw Mahdi Army men openly manning checkpoints with Kalashnikovs and other weapons, carrying the Glock pistols the Americans had given to the Iraqi police as well as police-issue handcuffs. But by August 2007 the Mahdi Army's reputation had been tarnished by its sectarian killings, and many of its members were out of control.