Haidar's 50 Cent tape was the perfect soundtrack for the capital, now a gangland paradise brutally rewritten by explosions and the violent incarnations of greed and revenge. I found the music helped with the lethal comedy of the place. It was Haidar whom I asked to set me up with a meeting with a certain cop from Sadr City.

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More dead will arrive as stunned and furious men mill around the main checkpoint near the gate, their minds adrift in grief that is already turning into hatred. Many of the men waiting are wearing the familiar black shirts and the thin beards of the Mahdi Army, which means that the morgue, like other government offices, is essentially under militia control. The guards all have obvious affiliations with unofficial armed groups, as do the police.

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On Tuesday, violence flared again, as suicide bombers detonated bombs across the street from the heavily-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad, killing as many as 16 people. Across Iraq, about 60 were killed, including 10 Shiites who were gunned down on a bus as it left for a funeral.

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Near the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, at Al Rasheed Street, there is a meandering alley named after the Iraqi poet Al Mutanabbi. The poet's street branches away from Al Rasheed and heads down through a tissue of dilapidated buildings with thin columns that hold up warped balconies. Bookstores of every description occupy the street-level spaces, selling technical manuals, ornate copies of the Quran and a nice selection of pirated software. Al Mutanabbi then runs downhill toward the mud-brown bend of the Tigris until veering west at a covered market and the high walls of an old mosque school. Right at the bend in the road is Baghdad's legendary literary cafe, the Shabandar, where for decades writers and intellectuals have come to drink tea and smoke tobacco from water pipes. The place is smoke-scarred and dirty. When there is electricity, which is almost never, the fans do not cool the air at all. Literary men in their shirt-sleeves sit and smoke.

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As Salihee approached the patrol from the east, another car was turning around in front of him. He began to drive around it to the right. Exactly what happened next is in dispute. What is certain is that as Salihee went around the car, the two U.S. snipers, thinking he was a suicide bomber, opened fire. At least four rounds were fired. One blew out the car's right front tire; another ricocheted off the ground and pierced the gas tank. The final 7.62 millimeter round pierced the driver's side of the windshield, entering Salihee's right eye and shattering his skull. Salihee died instantly.

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"I set up security around the truck. The truck was still burning," said a Marine who responded immediately at the scene, and who was only a few hundred feet to the east when it happened. The man requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the incident. "We went back to Entry Control Point 1 and grabbed 10 fire extinguishers. We attempted to put out the fire, but the fire burned until it wanted to stop. Twelve fire extinguishers couldn't put it out. We weren't able to get into the vehicle at all."

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Marla Ruzicka founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) in 2003, an NGO that began as a one-woman operation and grew to include dedicated Iraqis who compiled statistics of Iraqi civilian casualties. It was a difficult, heart-wrenching job. Marla pursued the casualty figures by going door to door in a country that sent so many other aid agencies over the brink. Human Rights Watch works in some of the most dangerous countries in the world. But it does not have field offices in Iraq.

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In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Bush told a subdued General Assembly, "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all." The words of the president ring hollow.

It is words to this effect that Iraq interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will likely echo during his visit to the White House Thursday.

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Forty-eight hours before the cease-fire collapsed in Najaf, the jovial al-Sadr militia sheik was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. We were driving down the long road toward Najaf, the Shiite holy city, from Baghdad, past Mahmudiya and Latayfiya, ambush towns hidden under long dark reefs of palm groves. In the back seat, I slept through the worst parts of the drive, waking up just north of the ruins of Babylon.

The sheik, a man who knew far more about me than I knew about him, did not dress in traditional Arab clothes. He did not, at least when he was around Westerners, wear the thin woolen abay, which is a symbol of rank and his right as a man of status. This barrel-chested man in his late 30s, a well-known figure of the Shiite resistance, was outgoing and intelligent. When he was in cellphone range of Baghdad, his phone rang every 20 seconds.

Perpetually hoarse from making arrangements, the sheik, perched in the passenger seat, was telling us what was going to happen. The sheik was fond of video above all other forms of mass communication because of its wide reach. He watched Al-Jazeera and Arabiya and knew that these stations catalyzed the Arab world against the American occupation of Iraq. Writers were not at the top of his list.

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Seconds after he said it, the street around the Humvees disappeared in clouds of dust where the al-Mahdi Army bullets hit the ground. The dust came up around the wheels. It looked like the Humvees were sinking. The heavy guns on the vehicles shuddered. Gunners standing up in the Humvees were returning fire, but it was hard to see if they hit any of the al-Mahdi fighters who were trying to hit the convoy. It was a gun battle on an empty street against invisible men. The U.S. convoy moved on down a few hundred feet and turned a corner. When the firing started again, one of the Bradley commanders spoke in rapid sentences over the radio. "We got some con-tact ..." We kept moving.

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When the young American arrives on a gurney with the bullet wound in his abdomen, the medic lifts him into the helicopter, making sure he is lying on his left side to ease the strain on his heart. If the soldier, whose name is Chris, closes his eyes, the medic talks to him and wakes him up. Over the palm groves north of Baghdad, the medic works out an IV to keep him from going into shock, and watches the flow of saline into his vein. Eight minutes later, the crew is taking Chris off the Black Hawk and running with his gurney through the emergency-room doors of the combat support hospital. Dr. Sudip Bose and the staff of the emergency room are there waiting for him.

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According to the surprise peace agreement, worked out between the tribal authorities and the opposing sides, the Mahdi army was to permanently put down its weapons and withdraw from the city. In return, the United States promised to honor the cease-fire and suspend operations, pulling back to bases near Najaf. Iraqi police, not U.S. forces or militiamen, were supposed to return and guarantee order.

But as of Friday afternoon, the Mahdi army had made no move to withdraw or lay down its weapons, leaving the most important part of the peace plan in ruins. U.S. tanks usually parked near the police station at the Revolution of 1920 Square could not be seen. Despite much hopeful talk, Najaf has not been returned to civilian authorities: It is still under the aegis of the militants and the secretive Sharia court they use to deliver sentences.

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In his Kufa sermon Muqtada had told his followers that they should fight on even if he was killed or captured, and the young leader took the time to thank various organizations, like the Sunni cleric's association, for their support. When I heard about the speech from a journalist who'd been there, it sounded like a retirement address, or a goodbye. Muqtada al-Sadr is getting ready. His photograph in Ansar al Mahdi, one of his official papers, shows an assistant dressing him in martyr's white, while the headline reads, "The Eagle of Benihashim Prepares to Die." The Benihashim are the descendants of the prophet Mohammed.

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As we turned to make our approach, an old car with a blanket-covered coffin tied to the roof passed us heading away from the fighting. The cabbie tried to speak to the other driver, to ask if it was safe to proceed. One older man looked at him with a blank expression and waved us on. He had just buried a family member in the sacred soil near the shrine of Ali, and his relatives had made a desolate pilgrimage in the middle of a battle between U.S. forces and Muqtada's army. When has the West known faith of such intensity? Not for centuries. We turned to enter the cemetery from the secondary road and then we saw them: young Al-Mahdi Army fighters with rocket-propelled grenades standing near the gate, a hole in the wall where the road goes up a slight hill to the city streets. They were covered in dust and walked slowly. The fighters didn't speak.

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Like many other prisoners of Abu Ghraib, al Baz was never charged with a crime and did not have the opportunity to defend himself before any court. As soon as he was arrested, he found himself plunged into a secretive network of American detention facilities with little connection to the outside world, a zone where human and civil rights were completely ignored. As a civilian in occupied Iraq, he should have been protected by the Geneva Conventions, but instead, al Baz became the victim of a war crime perpetrated by U.S. soldiers. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment ... Unlawful confinement of a protected person ... willfully depriving protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial."

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Then the nasty-looking fighter with the black scarf, wired from his running battle with the Americans and furious with us for being Westerners, began to search the car. It was a haphazard but disturbing search because he was looking for incriminating documents, anything that would link us to the Americans. It seemed that Black Scarf wanted to show his comrades how seriously he could deal with foreigners trying to cross the checkpoint. Soon, other gunmen were attracted to the commotion and it became a kind of competition, an absurd closing and reopening of the trunk of our Chevy Caprice. We were nearly allowed to continue on our way, but then a new soldier arrived and found my video camera in the trunk. The sight of it riled him up, but also made him happy because it was proof of our guilt. This new soldier, not to be outdone by Black Scarf, pulled the camera out of its case, took my press credentials and safe passage letter and told me to come with him.

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In the pitch darkness a week ago last Saturday, the al-Sadr militiaman on the rooftop near our hotel in Najaf began firing his heavy machine gun in long bursts toward the Najaf Sea. The gunfire went on for 10 minutes, until someone started shrieking on the street, and the gunner on the next rooftop suddenly gave up on his target. He could have been firing at cats, jumpy and scared because everyone expected the U.S. to attack the city that night. In the morning, we decided to stay another day at the An Najaf. The hotel had only two guests and the enormously fat owner, Abu Amir, slept in the lobby to keep out looters.

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In the late afternoon, this city became a ghost town as residents prepared themselves for a coalition assault. Civilians have gone inside, while small bands of militiamen moved quickly from one position to another, speaking of successful strikes against American Humvees. As if to signal worse times to come, a great wall of dust rose in the west and dimmed the sun into a milky disk.

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