Stuck in the middle

BAGHDAD — Iraqis here marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad -- and of their liberation from Saddam Hussein's tyranny -- in eerie silence and fear. Though April 9 was officially a national holiday, Baghdad's shops were shuttered and its streets deserted because of the emergency curfew declared by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, the head of Iraq's government, who in late March attacked the forces of his fellow Shiite, radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, in the southern port of Basra with no warning to either his Cabinet or his American protectors.

As I drove through the capital in an armed convoy of vehicles with blue and red flashing lights, Baghdad was silent except for the Muslim call to prayer that ricocheted from the city's minarets, the sound of mortars or rockets falling somewhere in the distance, and the thumping of American helicopters flying fast and low over the shuttered city.

For a journalist who had not visited Baghdad since the invasion, the scene was devastatingly surreal. Few buildings downtown remain untouched by the war or its far-bloodier aftermath. In the once fashionable Mansour district, the theft of steel rods from the gargantuan Mosque of the Merciful made one of its 75 domes collapse. But the rest of the mosque, which was under construction when the war began, was such a wreck -- with debris and chunks of gray concrete scattered throughout the site -- that the latest damage was barely noticeable.

Could things get worse? Yes. And they very well might if Washington, in the name of supporting the democratically elected Maliki government, gets our forces further embroiled in a battle among competing Shiite factions.

In addition to Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the areas hardest hit earlier this month by the fighting between Maliki's government forces and Sadr's militias are the two mainly Shiite parts of Baghdad: Sadr City, a northeastern suburb of well over 2.2 million people known, when I first visited the capital more than two decades ago, as Saddam City in homage to the dictator -- and Shula, another stronghold of Sadr's Mahdi Army, where more than a million people live.

Over tea, Raheem Darraji, Sadr City's mayor, told me that the more than 3 million Shiites in the two districts had been suffering from food and medicine shortages since the government imposed a virtual siege on their neighborhoods in early April. People couldn't get to their jobs or buy food; no vehicles could enter or leave the enclaves, not even ambulances; the only way in or out was on foot. A statement by Iraq's parliamentary committee on human rights called the humanitarian crisis "acute."