For now, the issue of displaced Iraqis' property rights is largely in the hands of neighborhood advisory councils, low-level political bodies that serve the Baghdad City Council and were established during the early months after the American-led invasion.
The councils attempt to keep records of homeowners, renters and squatters and to facilitate rent payments when possible. But because of jurisdictional boundaries, the councils are not able to play a substantial role in returning the displaced to their rightful homes.
Human rights groups estimate that 1.2 million people have been displaced within Iraq over the last two years and that the need to peacefully resettle them swiftly is crucial. But nearly half of those displaced say they do not intend to return to their old homes and neighborhoods, and that number is expected to increase, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration.
Even so, longtime residents consider the newcomers unwelcome guests. Many blame them for the violence in their neighborhoods, calling them criminals, religious extremists or shrugi, a pejorative implying low class or rural.
"If we had known the problems that this has caused, we would have left them in the street so that the government would have dealt with the problem from the outset," said Basil Zaki Shaker, a 44-year-old electrical engineer and longtime resident of the nearby Jamia neighborhood.
Shaker, a Sunni, said some newcomers had opened small vegetable stalls on the sidewalk, a sight unfamiliar on the residential streets in Adil before the war.
"Of course, we would like to remove them, but the law does not allow this, and we would probably be killed," said Shaker, chairman of Jamia's neighborhood council. "If you are deprived of a home, a wife, a dog, you have nothing to lose."
Neighborhood councils have such limited power that in some cases the leaders are themselves displaced. Ahmad Sabih Tawfeeq, a Sunni and council chairman in the mixed neighborhood of Mansour, three miles from the high-security Green Zone, fled to an undisclosed Baghdad district after members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia killed his brother and put a $10,000 bounty on his head.
"There is so much sadness in me," he said, "that I cannot concentrate on one thing. I don't smoke, I don't drink, but sometimes for no reason, I begin to cry."
