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.

Reconstruction, the most important step on the path to a sovereign and stable Iraq, has all but stalled because of targeted acts of violence that reach all the way south to Basra and north to Mosul. Successful countermoves by the Sunni insurgents have prevented the United States and new Iraqi government from gaining any real political support. In fact, billions of dollars originally allocated for reconstruction are now headed for security companies, which are quickly becoming private militias. Unfortunately for optimistic planners in the Bush administration, the coalition is up against not one single group but a constellation of allied militias. It’s as if the United States had gone to war against the tribal system itself. There are so many new fighter cells that they are at a loss to distinguish themselves, and so use kidnapping and videotapes as branding strategies. In this market, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wa al Jihad, with its monstrous beheading trademark, is the undisputed brand king. Some of the groups are crazier than others. It is a free market of demons.

In the past year, al-Qaida operatives have found in Iraq a fertile recruiting ground, the best possible training camp for jihad against the West, a destination any angry young man can reach if he has the will and pocket money. Iraq’s borders, which stretch across hundreds of miles of empty desert, are perfect for smugglers and men seeking martyrdom. No one really knows how many people are coming into Iraq to fight the U.S. But the fighters who do make it across are changing the character of the resistance, internationalizing it, injecting religious extremism into the politics of a once-secular Iraq. Young men coming in from other countries don’t fight for Iraq, they fight for Islam.

One of the unutterable truths for the administration is that the U.S. occupation is breeding and fueling insurgent groups. Iraqi government officials rightly fear for their lives, but Iraqi forces, which are supposed to be fighting alongside U.S. troops in the cause of a free and democratic Iraq, are often undisciplined, dangerous and in some places infiltrated by insurgent groups. The Mahdi Army in Sadr City has a number of police officers in its ranks, and in a little remarked upon event that took place during one of the large demonstrations in Baghdad at the time of the siege, the Iraqi police helped Sadr officials address a crowd of Muqtada al-Sadr supporters outside the neutral Green Zone.

On Aug. 13, with U.S. troops looking on, a Mahdi Army sheik urged the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to go to Najaf to support the men occupying the shrine. He used a public address system in the back of a police pickup to get his message across. The fighters were yelling and grabbing at journalists, proud that the police were on their side, and they wanted us to take note. Above us, in their watchtowers, Iraqi police hung pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr and waved to the crowd. The organizers of the rally were overjoyed.

Fringe groups, extreme groups, associations with the most vocal opposition to the U.S. occupation, steadily acquire more legitimacy in Iraq because they tend to express the true feelings of many Iraqis. Not everyone takes part in the fighting, but many people understand why the groups choose to fight. Jobs in the Iraqi National Guard and the Iraqi police tend to attract poor men who desperately need the money, while the insurgents attract believers, men who feel wronged and humiliated by the U.S. occupation, and who will work for nothing. They are volunteers. Which emotion is stronger?

Iraq is a place where there is no civil debate and interest groups mediate their conflicts with weapons. The U.S. has the most powerful armed presence, its own military, but as an interest group, it represents the smallest number of Iraqis, possibly only those it directly supports. Political legitimacy, we have long known, comes directly from the people; it is not something that can be dictated by a foreign power, no matter how noble its stated intentions. The Allawi government, the result of American occupation, is what many Iraqis scornfully call a U.S. puppet government. In the months following the “transfer of sovereignty,” I never heard a single Iraqi offer up praise for it. Not one.

The Sunni insurgents, a creepy hodgepodge of extremist imams, tribal sheiks, former Iraqi government officials and al-Qaida types, have not only scuttled the plans to rebuild the country, they have also cornered the political debate. Relying on abundant examples of victimization and prejudice against Iraqis and Muslims, the fighters present themselves as defenders of the faith. Kidnapping, execution and death threats have become acceptable practices in the eyes of some ordinary Iraqis who may have been horrified by it only a few months before.

When a well-educated Sunni shop owner named Abu Mustapha heard about the kidnapping of French journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, he wanted to express his sympathy. It sounded like this: “Phillip, it is very bad that they were kidnapped. You should be careful.” I pointed out that the people who were abducting noncombatants and threatening to kill them were behaving like animals. The hostage-takers were demanding that the French government repeal a law prohibiting religious symbols from being worn in schools. Abu Mustapha agreed with the insurgents. “You know, the French should change their law,” he said. “It is a bad law. Muslim girls should be able to wear the hejab in school.”

Contrary to the administration’s hopeful statements, we are not seeing the establishment of a stable Iraq, the mopping up of unreformed Baath Party apparatchiks and dead-enders. We are seeing the beginning of a larger conflict that is busily giving birth to monsters.

Since April, the coalition has lost ground in central and western Iraq and will be forced in the coming months to gain it back at great cost. Fallujah and Ramadi, two sizable Iraqi cities, are no longer under Iraqi government control. Sadr City, with several million people, remains a stronghold for the Mahdi Army and the site of a continuing series of battles. Najaf and Karbala, cities the military has taken back from the Mahdi Army, were never strongholds of the Shia resistance. In Najaf, citizens paid a high price for emancipation. They experienced the destruction of their city and must now set about rebuilding it, a process that will take years. It is hard to imagine that the U.S. is loved in Najaf. While the siege may have been a military victory, it was a political defeat. I left Najaf just as men were beginning to dig out bodies.

But Najaf did not serve as the headstone for the Mahdi Army; at best, the military defeat set them back a few months, driving them deeper underground. The first cavalry division and the Marines successfully routed the Muqtada fighters, pushing them to other cities, scattering them but not destroying them. In my second to last day in Najaf, at the end of the siege, journalists in the old city watched militiamen load wooden carts full of weapons and take them to new hiding places. When we asked where they were going, one fighter said to a comrade in an alley just off Rasul Street, “Don’t talk to these people, some of them are spies.” That was a perfectly normal response and we didn’t take it personally. But it was clear that they weren’t taking their anti-aircraft weapons and rockets to U.S. collection points for cash payouts. The skittish Mahdi Army fighters were busy smuggling their weapons out of town to other cities and a number of them were almost certainly headed for Baghdad. We watched them trundle the carts over the streets, trying to keep the weapons from spilling out onto the cobblestones.

Here is something everyone in Iraq knows: The U.S. is now fighting a holding action against a growing uprising, and the more it fights the worse it gets. At the other end of the spectrum, if the U.S. military were to suddenly withdraw, the largest armed factions in Iraq would immediately begin to compete for the capital in a bloody civil war. Recently, a National Intelligence Estimate, a document prepared for President Bush by senior intelligence officials, warned of exactly that outcome. It is the kind of analysis that Secretary of State Colin Powell might write off as defeatist if it had come from the press.

How much control does the U.S. military have over the country? Not as much as it would like. Large sections of the capital are in the hands of insurgents, and organized attacks on convoys, U.S. interests and Iraqi targets are on the rise. The administration can say things are getting better, that a newly democratic Iraq is facing its enemies, but last week Baghdadis woke up at 5 in the morning to the sound of a large volley of rockets slamming into the Green Zone. The explosions sounded like they were coming from more than one direction, the sign of a carefully coordinated attack.

This summer, it wasn’t unusual to wake up to the sound of roadside bombs going off near Humvees on their early morning U.S. patrols. Month by month, attacks became more severe, bombs more powerful. In the sky above the Duleimi hotel, medevac helicopters would shudder through the air on their way to combat support hospitals. When something truly ugly was going on, we could hear the rush of the medevac Black Hawks in a steady progression.

What the war’s champions prefer to ignore is that in large parts of Iraq, broad support exists for anyone willing to pick up a gun and fight the United States. Fighters become local stars and when they die, their friends hold their photographs as treasured objects, pass them around at parties, and later try to emulate their fallen buddies. Paradise awaits, full of virgins who have bodies made of light. Many young Iraqi men believe this. A young fighter guarding the bottom of Rasul Street in Najaf said, just before the collapse of the truce on Aug. 4, “Paradise is a place without corruption. It’s not like this place, it smells sweet.” Thousands of Iraqis, not all of them poor and unemployed, have checked into the resistance, not only because it’s honorable but because it’s fun. Spreading through family and neighborhoods, the insurgency can be anywhere, anytime.

A young Apache helicopter gunner who has fought in many of Iraq’s major battles wrote me a few days ago and said: “I have a feeling that with every one member of the resistance that we kill, we give birth to ten more.” At a distance of hundreds of feet in the air, a perceptive man can say this. Here is what the situation looks like from the ground.

Iraq seems modern only at first glance. The highways, factories and cities are familiar enough but they hide a deep tribal sensibility. Insults to family honor in Iraq are usually repaid in blood or money depending on the severity, and this system of revenge and honor fuels the war instead of slowing it down. The United States military, unable to relate to a tribal society, finds itself the player in a nationwide blood feud. To understand the intensity of these feelings of honor and kinship, read “Othello” or watch “The Godfather.” This is how many tribal Iraqis perceive the world. It is not necessarily a lack of sophistication but a mark of being outside the West. Tribal culture in Iraq goes back thousands of years. When an Iraqi man loses a family member to an American missile, he must take another American life to even the score. He may not subscribe to the notion that some Americans are noncombatants, viewing them instead as the members of a supertribe that has come to invade his land.

The war, illegal and founded on a vast lie, has produced two tragedies of equal magnitude: an embryonic civil war in the world’s oldest country, and a triumph for those in the Bush administration who, without a trace of shame, act as if the truth does not matter. Lying until the lie became true, the administration pursued a course of action that guaranteed large sections of Iraq would become havens for jihadis and radical Islamists. That is the logic promoted by people who take for themselves divine infallibility — a righteousness that blinds and destroys. Like credulous Weimar Germans who were so delighted by rigged wrestling matches, millions of Americans have accepted Bush’s assertions that the war in Iraq has made the United States and the rest of the world a safer place to live. Of course, this is false.

But it is a useful fiction because it is a happy one. All we need to know, according to the administration, is that America is a good country, full of good people and therefore cannot make bloody mistakes when it comes to its own security. The bitter consequence of succumbing to such happy talk is that the government of the most powerful nation in the world now operates unchecked and unmoored from reality; leaving us teetering on the brink of another presidential term where abuse of authority has been recast as virtue.

The logic the administration uses to promote its actions — preemptive war, indefinite detention, torture of prisoners, the abandonment of the Geneva Convention abroad and the Bill of Rights at home — is simple, faith-based and therefore empty of reason. The worsening war is the creation of the Bush administration, which is simultaneously holding Americans and Iraqis hostage to a bloody conflict that cannot be won, only stalemated.

Over the last three years, practicing a philosophy of deliberate deception, fear-mongering and abuse of authority, the Bush administration has done more to undermine the republic of Lincoln and Jefferson than the cells of al-Qaida. It has willfully ignored our fundamental laws and squandered the nation’s wealth in bloody, open-ended pursuits. Corporations like Halliburton, with close ties to government officials, are profiting greatly from the war while thousands of American soldiers undertake the dangerous work of patrolling the streets of Iraqi cities. We have arrived at a moment of national crisis.

At home, the United States, under the Bush administration, is rapidly drifting toward a security state whose principal currency is fear. Abroad, it has used fear to justify the invasion of Iraq — fear of weapons of mass destruction, of terrorist attacks, of Iraq itself. The administration, under false premises, invaded a country that it barely understood. We entered a country in shambles, a population divided against itself. The U.S. invasion was a catalyst of violence and religious hatred, and the continuing presence of American troops has only made matters worse. Iraq today bears no resemblance to the president’s vision of a fledgling democracy. On its way to national elections in January, Iraq has already slipped into chaos.

Jazairi was calm as he explained that this unpleasant situation was the fault of an Arab satellite channel, which had reported that Shiite leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made an appeal for public demonstrations. Sistani was on his way to the holy city of Najaf and had called for mass protests at the Imam Ali shrine to end the war, frightening the police into bracing for an attack. “It is not true that Sistani has called on people to come to Najaf; he never made any such statement,” the police chief of Najaf told us. Of course, Al Jazairi’s major problem was that the report was true.

After the lecture and a remarkably short period of arrest, Jazairi let us go. Outside, shaken reporters called their desks from the police station parking lot. Jazairi gave us an absurd apology before we left, “I wish for you to excuse our behavior,” he said.

The next morning, Jazairi’s officers would fire on unarmed protestors as they marched toward Najaf, killing more than twenty. In his own way, Jazairi had been telling us what was going to happen.

Thursday was bloody and incomprehensible. It was also a day when all the familiar polarities of Najaf reversed themselves. Sistani, who rarely leaves his house, was speeding across the country to break the siege in Najaf, collecting followers as he came up from Basra. A closed city instantly opened and instead of people fleeing, marchers were heading in. Hundreds of peaceful protesters would cross the lines of American troops, make it to the shrine and mix with the followers of Moqtada al Sadr without incident. For their part, Mahdi fighters were restrained and spoke of victory.

It was a confusing day because we did not know where to go first. Around midday, in the lobby of the Sea of Najaf hotel, frantic reporters kept track of Sistani’s convoy and made plans for covering the news. No one could make a decision. Convoys into the old city formed and splintered.

As we monitored Sistani’s progress toward Najaf, the police arrived and said that they would take us to see him. We refused to go with them. Only one journalist, an independent filmmaker named Andrew Berends, agreed. Shortly after leaving in a pickup truck full of policemen, he caught them on tape shooting directly into a crowd of demonstrators. “I just filmed the Iraqi police killing people,” Berends told me a few hours later, shocked by what he witnessed. “The demonstrators got a little excited and the police just started firing.”

By afternoon, the first waves of Sistani’s pilgrims were arriving at Iraqi police checkpoints, coming from distant cities across Iraq, but mainly from the Shi’a south. They had walked through checkpoints near Najaf, where the Najaf police panicked and gunned them down. The demonstrators were unarmed. We were about to see it for ourselves.

Sistani arrived in Najaf at 3 p.m. without his followers, driving directly to his house with no fanfare. He would meet with Sadr to discuss a ceasefire, but wouldn’t make a statement until he had rested. While we waited outside for him to appear, news leaked through that peace protesters were headed for the shrine and that some had made it through the American cordon and Mahdi Army lines. Frontlines were breaking down, becoming porous.

A small group of us pulled together a convoy and drove toward the outskirts of Najaf, looking for a way to follow the marchers to the shrine. Two blocks closer to the city, we heard the sound of gunfire and watched cars in front of us make sharp turns to get away. We pulled over, got out of the car and the shooting stopped.

There was a cluster of pilgrims on the sidewalk, mostly older men, waiting to go to the shrine. “Our marjah Sayeed Ali Sistani asked us to come and put an end to the violence, Saad Husseini said. “We come to end the siege of Najaf. When we asked him if he had problems on the road, he nodded. “Yes, they killed 10 of us. If they had the ability to stop us, they would have, but it was a massive convoy. Husseini was talking about the Iraqi police.

We crossed the street on foot, passing Iraqi police pickup trucks, machine guns mounted on the cabs, and walked a few blocks into the city. Najafis offered us water stored in coolers filled with large chunks of ice. They had prepared it for the pilgrims.

We were a few blocks away from a large mass of demonstrators when the shooting broke out again. Men shouted and screamed as they tried to get away from the firing. I looked down the street and saw hundreds of pilgrims lined up and ready to cross a major road into Najaf. It was a long array of men in white and brown dishdashas; after the firing, I looked back and saw they were gone.

A mass of people arrived from another direction and police fired down those streets too, aiming for the demonstrators. The pilgrims called out to us; they wanted us to capture everything that was happening. When there was a break in the firing, I went to a corner and saw the Iraqi police surround a man and whip him with a length of electrical wire. Rita Leistner, a Canadian photographer, caught the scene with the long lens on her Nikon. Iraqi police continued to fire down cross streets to hem in the pilgrims.

The rest of our walk through the shattered city was uneventful. It was quiet. At five in the evening, when fighting is usually the heaviest, there was only the sound of glass under our feet. As we made our way toward the shrine, we saw a line of pilgrims walking along Rasul Street. When we joined them, we saw Mahdi forces leaving town in civilian clothes and civilian pilgrims headed toward the shrine of Ali. In the time it had taken us to walk from the edge of town to Rasul Street, the ceasefire had taken hold; demonstrators had broken the siege.

Walking toward the gold dome of the shrine, we saw that sections of buildings had been sheared away by U.S. bombs. Careful rows of computers filled a shop that no longer had an exterior. The scene at the shrine was worse. Fighting in the past few days had forced Mahdi Army lines to collapse and the mosque was greatly damaged by air strikes. During our brief walk, I could see few untouched sections of the old city. Every block showed the scars of war.

In the mosque’s infirmary, there was no doctor. Assistants had left bloody instruments lying in stainless steel dishes waiting to be sterilized. The hospital was filthy, a sign that the Mahdi Army had lost its grip; the shrine was full of wounded, traumatized men. Nurses stared into space. An old man lay on a mat on the marble floor, the victim of flying shrapnel. In the shrine’s bathrooms, usually kept clean so the faithful can make their ablutions before prayer, there was little running water and a foul smell.

Near a long wash basin, a man came to me and asked, “Do you know about the Mahdi? I told him I knew about him. “The Mahdi is coming with Jesus to dispense justice over the world. He went on to describe the imminent arrival of the Shi’a Islamic Messiah. During the past few months, Mahdi Army fighters had been quick to tell me about how the Mahdi is coming any day now, how Moqtada al Sadr is the Mahdi. I did not have the courage to ask the man what he would do if the Mahdi never came.

Photographer Thorne Anderson and I left the shrine and walked out of the old city. I saw a few friends on the way out and was pleased to know that they were still alive. In another time they could have been fighting with bow and arrow against men with muskets. On Rasul Street, we caught a bus full of pilgrim travelers from Amarah. The conductor would not take money for a ticket. We were his guests.

The Sistani peace agreement is the final chapter of a siege that shattered Najaf and left it in ruins. Following a series of stalled attempts to end the fighting, Sadr had finally agreed to take his forces out of the Shi’a holy city. (However, when Sistani’s representative, Dr. Hamid Hafaf, read the agreement on Thursday evening, there wasn’t much to indicate that the deal was little more than a surrender for the Mahdi Army, with a face-saving caveat.) The few remaining Mahdi Army members had to abandon their weapons and leave Najaf and Kufa by 10 a.m. Friday. The demonstrators, too, had to leave the shrine by that deadline.

Despite one last-minute firefight between the Iraqi police and the Mahdi Army, Sistani’s return to Najaf and his call for a peace pilgrimage had shut down this zone of the war.

On Friday morning, the Iraqi police arrived at the Sea of Najaf hotel at six in the morning with another announcement. They were always turning up at strange hours. They came to tell us that Sistani’s peaceful march was authorized to go into the old city and that we should follow them. If we wanted to see the demonstrators enter the city, then we must leave immediately.

At 1920 square, a traffic circle on the main road leading into town, the police had set up a checkpoint and marchers were searched. Every man was frisked for weapons before being allowed down the road. More were arriving every moment, and soon there were thousands. We followed the marchers into the city and through Mahdi Army lines.

Groups of young fighters watched the marchers without expression. Across the street, two men carried the remains of a comrade in a blanket and shouted at photographers to stay away.

As we crossed into the old city, a network of small alleys and shops torn apart by gunfire, we saw a cluster of Mahdi soldiers watching the procession in silence. Karrar Kadim Jasim, a young fighter, told me, “We have orders from Moqtada Sadr for a ceasefire. If the coalition forces come, we will shoot.” I asked him about Iraqi police. “We don’t have an order to shoot the police. But the police are no good. One of us can kill 10 of them.”

At that moment, a white and blue Iraqi police land cruiser, its lights flashing, pulled up across from Karrar’s position. That’s when the shooting started. Photographer Rita Leistner was caught in the middle of the street but couldn’t tell who fired first. The shooting went on for a few minutes, while Karrar fired his machine gun at the police and rose from it. When it was over, I walked to the shrine, where fighters were having their morning tea.

A few minutes later on Rasul Street, I heard an announcement come over the shrine loudspeakers: “This is an announcement from Moqtada al Sadr. Please respect the demonstrators. All soldiers, please leave Najaf and Kufa without your weapons.”

This verbal order was the end of the fighting in the holy city, the signal that the battle had been lost and won. It had taken a mere three weeks for both sides to ravage the old city, causing several hundred deaths and an unknown number of injuries among both civilians and fighters. It was a simple announcement that told them to give up. “If you don’t obey the order it will be bad for you and Moqtada Sadr,” said the voice on the loudspeaker. I was curious about how they would handle their weapons. Who would get them?

In an alley near the shrine, where we were taking shelter from the sun, Mahdi fighters were moving cartloads of rocket launchers under blankets. They were not turning them over to police, nor were they leaving them behind. Fighters spent the morning collecting their guns but wouldn’t give out any details about what they were doing; questions about weapons made them nervous.

A middle-aged fighter named Abu Najim, who was sitting next to me, said that he had seen how frightened U.S. soldiers were in battle, which made him believe that the United States was coming to an end, just like the Soviet Union had. Pilgrims milled around the shrine, kissing the gates, while down the street Sistani supporters, not used to chanting so much, stood around a picture of the Ayatollah, as Mahdi fighters glared at them.

Across the street from the shrine was a three-story building. It used to be Sadr’s security office but had been flattened by a U.S. bomb. In the basement, 12 fighters were buried in the rubble. There was a smell of dead things rotting. A man named Thayer stood looking at the collapsed building. He said his uncle and his friends were inside but he had no way to get them out. Slowly, crowds began to form around the shattered buildings on the west side of town. Families came to retrieve the bodies of their dead. But there was no way to move the tons of rubble to get at the bodies. Lacking tools, the families of the victims merely stood and stared at the building’s shell. The fighters would not let them go in and search for their relatives.

After the 10 o’clock deadline, when the fighters were not armed, the massive shrine doors were closed and Shia worshippers gathered on the north side, crying and kissing the wood. Everyone had left the mosque, and the pilgrims were drifting away.

The shrine was locked and looked strange with its doors closed.

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.

In a stroke of luck, Andrew Berends, an independent filmmaker from New York, had asked if he could ride with us to Najaf. The sheik took to Andy and his camera at first sight. For the next five days, we would travel together, recording the spreading violence.

As we headed south, the land flattened into white desert. Driving past a rime of houses along the highway, I realized that the man in the front seat was a new kind of Iraqi politician, half resistance fighter, half public relations man. He was worldly, not a cleric, and he lacked the soft manners of al-Sadr theologian-orators who had studied in Islamic seminaries. The sheik did not often speak of God, but he was careful to pray at the correct times. When he did, other men prayed behind him.

The sheik had an unsettling talent for finding out a great deal about new acquaintances. If the sheik wanted to know something about you, he asked everyone who knew you for information and was not satisfied until he got what he was after. The sheik did not mind if the background check made you uncomfortable, and it was unwise to lie to him. I never saw him look tired.

South of Latayfiya, we passed a convoy of Humvees and the sheik laughed when he saw the American soldiers. “Look at them, they are begging for rockets,” he said. As it turned out, the rockets were on their way. The cease-fire was about to collapse.

In fact, the critical event had come on Monday, the day before we left for Najaf. U.S. Humvees and Iraqi forces had fired on buildings near Muqtada al-Sadr’s house and attacked al-Mahdi army fighters across the street. According to witnesses, U.S. and Iraqi forces had come down the street several times before, but this would be the last straw and a deliberate provocation.

To show how dangerous the situation would become, the sheik, while in his Baghdad office, had given me a copy of a letter. It was a general mobilization order for all Mahdi forces in Iraq and had come directly from Muqtada al-Sadr’s office in Najaf. Dated Aug. 2, the letter said that Americans had broken the terms of cease-fire and the militia would immediately go on alert — a credible sign that things were about to go up in flames. As we drove into the center of Najaf, I kept the al-Mahdi mobilization order in my pocket, tucked under a safe-passage letter that was long out of date.

Our first stop in Najaf was at Muqtada al-Sadr’s house for a look at the firefight damage. The sheik wanted us to see it. Set in the middle of an unremarkable block, with a view of a parking lot, Muqtada al-Sadr’s house didn’t look like much — it was an exercise in modesty. Smaller than the houses around it, it was a simple two-story Iraqi modern place with aluminum gates and high walls. There was nothing to distinguish it from the neighbors except the cell of well-armed fighters across the street and the burned-out shell of a car on the sidewalk.

When we got out of our car to take a look around, the sheik ran over to the Mahdi guards to explain what we were doing and to get the latest news. The sheik joked with the house guards, who were happy to see him, and in a few minutes they took us on a damage tour. Without the sheik, we would have been arrested on the spot.

I asked a young guard near the house if he had seen the firefight; he said he had. He then gave us a detailed account that Andy recorded.

“The Americans are coming to provoke us and came four times but our people had no permission to fire,” he said. “They crashed through checkpoint barriers. The fourth time was yesterday. A woman died and a hospital was damaged. God will punish them.”

One U.S. news story said the patrol that went by Sadr’s house had become lost in the city, ending up there by mistake. Since a new unit was patrolling Najaf, this was a possibility. But I believed, as other observers did, that the U.S. provoked the Mahdi army into all-out war.

Najaf, a desert city at the edge of a flood plain, with its great gold dome of the shrine rising over the necropolis, was filled with pilgrims and everyone else. The city was devoted to its sacred dead. During the hot hours of the afternoon, the city emptied, but at around 6, residents woke up from their siestas and opened their shops. The city was busy and the sheik seemed to know it well.

After leaving Muqtada’s house, Andy and I followed the sheik to evening prayers at the shrine. We walked up Rasul Street, a busy street where I have many friends. At the mosque was the usual spectacle of families carrying their dead along a circuit through the shrine gates before burying them in sacred ground, shouting, “Allah, Allah, il Allah.” Andy filmed the hundreds of praying Sadr supporters, holding his camera close to the face of the imam, Jabbar al Khafaji. The sheik kept us from being thrown out.

Later that evening in the mosque, I spoke to the sheik Ali Smeisem, a senior advisor to Muqtada, about the precarious nature of the cease-fire. I asked if the truce was going to collapse. “The violations were completely against the accepted peace plan,” Ali Smeisem said. In his late 50s, he spoke with a serious and measured style common among diplomats. “We gave instructions to the al-Mahdi army not to target American forces, but they shot the guards of the house. We are peace seekers.”

In retaliation for the attacks against Muqtada’s house, the Mahdi army kidnapped Iraqi police officers. It seemed the militia was trying to preserve a balance, avoid all-out warfare, yet still respond to the attacks at al-Sadr’s house.

When I asked Smeisem if the Mahdi army would participate in the Iraqi elections scheduled in January, he said yes, it would. I was surprised. They were getting ready to field candidates in national elections. The U.S. would certainly find an electoral victory for the Mahdi difficult to live with in post-Saddam Iraq. If one accepted that logic, the drive to crush Muqtada would have to begin before the U.S. elections in November and Iraqi elections in January.

I knew the war was going to start again, but I didn’t stay in Najaf. The mobilization order, police kidnappings, bellicose statements of the new Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, all pointed to renewed fighting. At the time, though, I thought it was important to return to Baghdad. Besides, the sheik wanted to be dropped off in Sadr City, and he wanted to leave immediately.

That night, after leaving Smeisem at the shrine, we found a pilgrim hotel and slept fitfully.

Wednesday, Aug. 4

In the early morning, we left for Baghdad. Our car broke down south of Latayfiya, one of the ambush towns, so we caught a minibus into Baghdad. The fighting would start in less than 24 hours.

Thursday, Aug. 5

The manic acceleration started. From here on out, each day would be worse than the previous day, less predictable, all guarantees of safety steadily eroded.

Andy and I were coming back from the Associated Press office when we heard that U.S. and al-Mahdi forces were fighting in Najaf, that the battles were fierce, were not skirmishes, and the U.S. was claiming hundreds of fighters killed. We quickly called the sheik in Sadr City and asked permission to meet him in his own sector. Sadr City always follows Najaf in violence and we wanted to make sure we would be allowed through the checkpoints. The Sadr sheik agreed to let us come. We didn’t stop at our hotel; we went straight to Sadr City. Without his permission, the door to the Shiite district would have been locked, but he wanted journalists to document the resistance, and he wanted the resistance to be on television.

We arrived in the afternoon to find Sadr City sealed by al-Mahdi checkpoints. Hundreds of fighters in black were guarding the major intersections with rocket launchers, rifles and mortars. At the intersection closest to the sheik’s house, we stood in the sun watching the fighters wire artillery shells as roadside bombs, then cover the devices with bits of scrap metal.

The sheik directed traffic and posed for photographs. An Iraqi fighter with his face covered said, “We are going to fuck them. We are going to destroy them. The Americans violated the truce.” When I asked him his name, he said it was “Muqtada.”

Battles between U.S. and Sadr forces erupted later in the day, just as the Mahdi army was kicking us out of town. According to one story, another militia official had seen us and had become irritated with the media presence. Across the rooftops, we watched a cloud of smoke and dust rise from an air strike, but our guides would not allow us to stop. At least 26 people were killed in Sadr City on Thursday, bloodier than some of the worst days in Najaf.

Friday, Aug. 6

On the second day of fighting, Andy and I decided to stay away from Sadr prayers at the mosque and remain in Baghdad. We drove to Sadr City in the early evening, hoping to see what happened at night. I had never been allowed to watch the fighters work at night and the sheik was offering us a degree of access that very few journalists have had in Iraq.

In a kebab restaurant across from his office, the sheik offered to take us to an attack site. We immediately agreed. We took a short drive down a broad street until we heard car tires squealing as drivers in front of us caught sight of an American Bradley convoy and made panicked U-turns. Then we made a quick left down a nearby alley. The Bradley convoy parked across the street.

Light was almost gone and it was settling down into dusk. We got out of the car with the sheik and saw a pickup truck with five Mahdi army soldiers speeding down the street toward us. The fighters jumped out and one man ran down the street with a rocket launcher, telling Andy not to film him. He then knelt down and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Bradleys from the corner where the alley met the broad avenue. We had just ducked inside a door of a house when the fighter pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening and the rocket missed the convoy.

A few minutes later, a firefight broke out and the Bradleys returned fire with their machine guns; the air sounded like it was coming apart along the seams. Some local people took us in, and an old patriarch, a descendant of the prophet, told us that Americans, “Instead of showing us respect for human rights, they violated them. Instead of preserving the riches of the country, they wasted them.” The family was warm. They sang Muqtada songs. We drank tea with them and then walked outside into the warm night air.

We left Sadr City in the dark and saw fighters pouring gasoline on the tarmac, lighting it, then burying roadside bombs under the soft tar. By morning, the city would be a minefield with hundreds of explosives hidden beneath the roads. At night, the burning tarmac made the place look infernal, the orange light of the fires guttering below a blank sky without stars.

Saturday, Aug. 7

In the lobby of our hotel in Baghdad, we hired a new driver named Ahmed. It turned out to be a stroke of bad luck because he would cause problems. And any problem is a serious problem. He was lazy and dishonest, although we didn’t know it yet. We also didn’t realize that he was setting himself up as a fixer and guide to urban warfare in Sadr City, who didn’t want competition from any of our contacts.

Ahmed took us to Sadr City but did not bring us to the sheik, the man who made it possible for us to stay in town, the man we had arranged to meet. Instead, Ahmed made his own deal with fighters in a different sector. We spent an hour at an ambush position a few blocks over from some very heavy fighting with Americans, waiting for a battle that never took place. We waited for an hour, talking to the commanders, promising not to show the identities of the fighters on the tape.

After a tense wait with sporadic gunfire breaking out down the street, the commander of the sector told us to follow a group of his fighters in our car. They piled into a white sedan and we followed, listening for helicopters overhead. We were told not to take photographs of their faces and waited while they wound scarves around their heads or pulled down ski masks.

We didn’t know what would happen next, but small groups of fighters were leaving their sector to attack the Americans a few blocks away. We followed their car for a few blocks and then parked. A young fighter with a bandaged hand and a sniper rifle got out, ran to a corner, knelt, then fired four shots at some American vehicles. Andy filmed the sniper taking aim and pulling the trigger. After he fired, the sniper said, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” running back to his car. We followed. Back at the intersection the sniper was waving his gun out the window in triumph and the men who saw him cheered.

We decided to wait for the sheik to come for us because we couldn’t move freely with battles going on a few blocks down Falah Street. We called our man every five minutes. When he found us in the new sector, our driver made the error of threatening him; he didn’t know who the sheik was. Our Mahdi army protector then left us at the intersection, furious, and he would not forgive the lapse of honor.

Minutes later, the Mahdi army fighters on the corner kicked us out of the city, escorting us to the border with Baghdad, saying the order had come down from the Sadr office, which wasn’t true. When I got back to the meeting point just outside town, we learned that a colleague and a close friend also working in Sadr City that day were abducted and beaten by a carload of armed men. It was a miserable day. The photographer who was beaten by the gunmen was a brave journalist and I couldn’t stop thinking about him in his torn shirt, his face swollen from blows.

Back in our Baghdad hotel, I heard the sounds of mortars landing in the Karrada district. The Mahdi army was firing mortars in retaliation for the fighting in Najaf. This was a new tactic, sowing chaos in Baghdad to protest the American assault. The Mahdi army would also threaten the oil pipelines and successfully stop the flow of oil to Basra for a few days. A fighter with the Mahdi army told us that there were Western targets outside Sadr City that the militia planned to attack. He named rocket attacks on ministries, firefights in rich neighborhoods. Much of what the Mahdi fighter told us turned out to be true.

Sunday, Aug. 8

As we drove to Sadr City, Andy took deep breaths. He hated the ride in. “Once I’m there, I’m fine,” he said. It’s true, he was fine once he was in. I also hated the ride in, but I didn’t have a ritual beyond waiting for the fighters at the checkpoints to order us out of the car and ask us for the safe-passage letter. But that didn’t happen today. We arrived in Sadr City at around 9:30 in the morning. As we drove through the furnace air and the nearly empty streets, heading for the sheik’s house, Iraqi fighters in Geyara shot down an American helicopter with an antiaircraft missile. It happened quite close to where we were driving, in front of the al-Quds mosque. On our way to the mosque, we could see Apaches flying cover. One fired down into the houses near the helicopter crash site. We saw the white flashes of the cannons as they were fired. We drove closer to the crash site and parked. As soon as the car stopped moving, Andy took his video camera and ran toward the mosque, disappearing inside the battle.

After a short lull, a convoy of Bradleys surrounded the mosque and al-Mahdi fighters started to converge on the scene, cutting Andy off from us. When I called Andy, a fighter answered his phone, but that wasn’t the real problem. Fighters often take cellphones from journalists as a security measure and then give them back when the operation is finished. The real problem was the fighting was just getting started and there was no way to move.

On the opposite block, I watched Apaches come in fast and low, looking for targets, while Bradleys fired at militiamen converging on the crash site. The downing of the helicopter was the beginning, not the end, of battle. Fighters carrying rocket launchers sprinted down our alley in groups of four and five. During one of the helicopter passes, the pilot brought his Black Hawk so low that I could see the bootlaces of one of the gunners. When the machine turned to face the crowd of Iraqis on the corner near the mosque, I felt ill. There was the black shape of the machine and a shuddering sound from the rotors. It did not fire at us.

While I was trying to contact Andy, I was swarmed by kids who wanted to know where I lived. They told me their names in between approaches of the U.S. helicopters. They showed me how they made Molotov cocktails for their older brothers and fathers to throw at American vehicles. One young boy, more outgoing than the others, asked me to name the great Shiite imams in chronological order. After I gave him the first four, we were friends.

Soon, I was sitting in a nearby house with a family, drinking cold water. The women were terrified; but inside the walls of the house, the hospitality of the patriarch reigned. Inside, there were only old men and young boys, as all the fighting-age men were outside with weapons. The family that took me in had nothing, not even clean water or electricity. But everything they had, they offered their guest.

From the house, I made a series of calls to the sheik to tell him Andy’s situation and asked him to come to the al-Quds mosque to help get him out. The sheik said he would come. I waited.

Andy, unable to move through the battle near the mosque and the crashed helicopter, was taken in by an Iraqi man and given shelter, while Bradleys sealed off the street and fired at the Mahdi fighters. After a few rough hours, Andy reappeared with the sheik, who had somehow managed to find him in the blocks near the mosque. We drove around the sector and stumbled upon U.S. recovery crews, dragging the shattered carcass of the helicopter down the road. The sheik was overjoyed when Andy filmed it. Clusters of Iraqis watched the recovery crews from the street corners, hiding from the Americans and laughing.

As I write this evening, news that U.S. Marines are fighting in the center of Najaf is just coming over the wires. Muqtada’s block has been bombed, and a great torrent of smoke is boiling out of the old city. In Sadr City, where the Mahdi army has almost universal support among the 2 million people who live there, the fighting is not coming to an end. It is just beginning.

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.

When we drove into the ambush, the 1st Cavalry soldiers were on their way to meet the Iraqi police and search an arms dealer’s house. As the convoy arrived at the dealer’s street, the four Iraqi police trucks slowed down but didn’t stop. The Iraqis were supposed to conduct the search while the Americans provided security. Sgt. Reggie Butler, a young African-American in charge of the 1st Platoon, was laughing when he watched the Iraqi police take off. “I was calling over the radio, ‘Red 4 to Red 2, you see any IP’s? You see any IP’s?’” Butler parked his Bradley so that the police couldn’t get past the American cordon but they found a way through, inching past the Bradleys on the median. “They squeezed right between us, then eight Humvees went chasing after them.”

From the second Bradley, I watched the white police pickups edge past the alley where the arms dealer lived and then disappear, leaving Butler’s vehicle exposed to the narrow passage. Butler was blocking the alley when his gunner turned to see an Iraqi pull the trigger on a rocket launcher. With the Iraqi police missing and the locals firing rockets at the convoy, Alpha Company abandoned the cordon-and-search and headed for the base at 50 miles an hour, narrowly missing a roadside bomb. When we got back, I asked Lt. Derek Johnson, the 1st Platoon leader, what happened. He only said, “Yeah, that was a real cluster fuck,” and then walked back to his barracks exhausted.

On April 4 when the mass uprisings began across Iraq, Sadr City, which had been relatively calm, suddenly became one of the most violent places in the country. The 1st Cavalry had just taken over a few days earlier and had no idea what to expect. When it finally happened, the carefully planned Mahdi Army offensive caught them off guard. Sadr City is not like the rest of Baghdad; it has its own identity, a collective mind that can become violent or joyful in an instant. You quickly get the feeling that everyone knows everybody else. It is a poor place but that does not capture it. Sheep graze on the medians, which are heaped with garbage. Thin young men sell black-market gasoline and cigarettes on the sidewalk, and there is the sound of vendors yelling in the white sun. Ruined avenues branch out into thousands of narrow alleyways full of children. When the residents decided to rise up against the U.S., it happened quickly.

Now, after months of continuous fighting, young men in the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment have experienced some of the highest casualties of any unit in post-invasion Iraq, with a number of soldiers receiving multiple Purple Hearts. Two are still on duty. There’s a fatalistic joke going around the barracks that goes, “If you get five Purple Hearts, you get to go home.” More than 30 members of Alpha Company have been wounded in action, and those who haven’t been describe miraculous near-misses outside the base. For Alpha Company soldiers, these are bad odds, and they get worse in light of the current administration’s policy — fewer U.S. soldiers in Iraq means greater stress for those sent into it, soldiers out on constant patrols, working vast areas of operation. Here, there are fewer than 600 U.S. soldiers patrolling a hostile city of 2 million people.

On April 4 alone, Charlie Company, one of the units that patrols Sadr City, took 17 casualties. Alpha Company, the second unit to be caught in the Mahdi Army offensive, sustained 13 casualties with two deaths. Alpha Company was trying to rescue soldiers from Charlie Company when they were also pinned down by Mahdi fighters. The result of the ambush was a bloodbath. U.S. soldiers were riding in a large open truck that provided no cover from the attack. “That was a bad day,” Reggie Butler told me. “Everybody who thought they were hard, they thought again after that.”

Living in a permanent state of dread, many of the men in the Alpha Company barracks are distant and sullen, unable to trust a recent lull in the fighting. “I don’t like cease-fires,” a medic named Andrew Lamkin said. “It just gives them time to prepare.” The war in Sadr City has paused for a delicate cease-fire while the Shiite firebrand and leader of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada al-Sadr, maneuvers for leverage with an embryonic Iraqi government. It will start up again whenever he feels he is being ignored. I asked a contact who works as an intelligence officer in the Mahdi Army about the prospects for the cease-fire and he said, “It can break down at any time. Instantly.”

Reggie Butler led his platoon on the relief mission for the Charlie Company convoy trapped in the city-wide ambush on April 4. He went out twice that day, trying to rescue trapped soldiers. The cadences and rhythms in his voice are Southern — he does not have any of the nervous intensity of men from cities; he is measured and clear. Butler is also honest and soft-spoken, a quality that draws the other soldiers to him. Only 30, he has been married twice and speaks Albanian, which he picked up on his peacekeeping mission in the Balkans. Butler’s wife is German and she is in Europe with his daughters, waiting for him to return.

“Fallen soldiers” memorial

In his room at the base in Sadr City, as Butler began telling me the story of what happened on April 4 he was calm and even. But once he got going, he talked without pausing for two hours. His account of April 4 reminded me of torture victims curing themselves though speech, a deliberate purging of events from his mind. Stories poured out of him. The most wrenching part of Butler’s experience was the death of his close friend, Spc. Ahmed Cason, who was shot as he stood in the Humvee gunner’s well a few inches away. Butler, along with the other members of the platoon, had taken several turns, heading deeper into the city where the fighting intensified, driving into what would quickly become a citywide ambush. When he described how much shooting was coming down from the rooftops, Butler pantomimed rain.

“Some guys were frozen, scared, they were gone, they were just lost. That’s when Cason was hit. After he got hit, he dropped down, then he got back up and started shooting. I didn’t think he was hurt that bad. Then he dropped down and he was bleeding all over the Humvee. Crabbe, the medic, started pulling off his clothes, doing first aid. I asked how he was doing and Crabbe told me, ‘We need to get him out right now.’” The entire city was firing from the buildings on the broad avenues. One Alpha Company gunner told me, “You could see the battlefield just opening out in front of your eyes. It was amazing,” and he shook his head in disbelief.

After Cason was shot, Butler and his team spent the next 15 minutes being ambushed and unable to move. While they struggled to get out, Cason was bleeding to death. “Cason came to me and asked to be in my crew in Iraq; he said, ‘If we go to Iraq I want to be in your vehicle.’ So I made it happen,” Butler said. He was working on a slide show for Cason when I walked into his room to talk about April 4.

Butler wrote a powerful and simple eulogy that was read at the fallen-soldier ceremony for Cason. Butler’s computer is full of pictures he’s taken during the war. There is a snapshot of Cason drinking beer; there are pictures of Cason’s fallen-soldier ceremony. After knocking on Butler’s door, I realized I had stumbled into a memorial in progress. Butler was sitting on his bed talking, surrounded by cards from home, the archivist and conscience of the platoon.

As he described the route his Humvee took through the roadblocks that day, he did not exaggerate or use the saccharine rhetoric of liberation; he described events in concrete terms. There is a straightforward reason for this — Butler is trying hard, along with the other members of Alpha Company, merely to live through Sadr City.

He has a long way to go.

As it has with many other frontline soldiers serving in Iraq, the military has “stop-lossed” Butler, which means that he is not allowed to leave the Army until the Iraq deployment is over and his unit is replaced 10 months from now. If the cease-fire with the al-Mahdi Army breaks down, the odds that he will make it through without serious injury spike sharply downward. Worse yet, senior officers at Camp Eagle have been leaning on him to reenlist. “You know, they tried to really guilt-trip me, saying, ‘The military has spent a lot of money training you.’”

In the abstract universe of military balance sheets, this is true — Butler explained he is one of only six sergeants of his rank who has graduated from the elite Ranger school and is also qualified as a master gunner. But after going out on missions with him, I began to understand that the real reason the commander wants to keep him is that the 1st Platoon might not survive his departure. It is Reggie Butler’s indispensability that makes him so dispensable. Catch-22.

On June 27, four days into my stay on the base, Butler was coming out of the command post for Alpha Company just as I was going in. He asked me if I was going out in the afternoon. I said yes, I was joining a mission to the Sadr City power substation to ask the engineers what they needed in way of supplies. “Well, if you get into anything, I’m the one coming out for you,” Butler said.

After leaving the substation, the Bradleys threw comet trails of dust down the street and then stopped to perform a snap checkpoint, which involves choking off the traffic in both directions, while Iraqi soldiers searched cars full of young men. As soon as the Bradleys pulled up on the wide median, a crowd gathered on each side of the road to watch the Americans. When the Iraqi soldiers went over to perform crowd control, the young men on the street started to jeer and taunt them, calling the Iraqi soldiers traitors and collaborators.

I watched one young Iraqi soldier named Hosham stand in front of 50 jeering residents, shouting back at them because he couldn’t take their insults. The boys in the crowd started singing the al-Mahdi Army song in which they pledge to spill their blood for Moqtada. When Hosham finally pulled the bolt back on his Kalashnikov, the crowd only found worse taunts. Hosham stood in front of the gawkers, held his rifle in the air, pulled the trigger and fired a burst that echoed off the houses. Everything changed. The sidewalk crowd fell silent, then drew back and became an angry mob. The vendors selling gasoline on the sidewalk raised their fists and neighborhood men started to come out of their houses. The crowd grew.

A single U.S. soldier walked across the street, apologized to the bystanders and took the rifle from the Iraqi soldier, dragging him back to the Bradleys. He said to him, “If you put your finger on that trigger, I will shoot you myself, OK?” The translator translated and the ICDC soldier, who was little more than a boy himself, nodded his head. They had shamed him.

After the ICDC soldier with the wounded sense of honor fired his rifle into the light and heat of Sadr City, we piled quickly back into the Bradleys and drove a few blocks until the vehicle in front of us threw a wheel and broke down. It was intensely depressing. No vehicle in the convoy could leave until the damaged machine could roll under its own power. To pass the time I talked to the kids who darted out to the median when they saw the U.S. soldiers. “Write ‘Moqtada is good,’” a 9-year-old said. “Write it.” I made a show of taking notes, then asked him his name. “Moqtada!” the thin kid with a shock of brown hair shouted. “My name is Moqtada!” The other boys laughed, elbowed one another and stared. I asked another young boy standing next to the first kid for his name. “Moqtada!” And you? “Moqtada!” Seven boys said their names were Moqtada, and thought it was most serious joke in the world. The seven Moqtadas vanished back into the alleys.

Meanwhile, the soldiers from Alpha Company were getting nervous at being exposed for such a long time on the street. Staying anywhere on the street longer than 15 minutes provokes great unease because that is roughly the amount of time it takes for the Mahdi fighters to find their positions. The crew of the broken-down Bradley couldn’t fix the missing wheel, so we waited, surrounded by a growing mob. The U.S. soldiers were in combat positions waiting for incoming fire when Butler rolled up in his Bradley. Five minutes later, Butler and another sergeant named Pitts got the damaged machine moving again and we were free.

The next morning, Lt. Johnson, Butler’s commanding officer, stood at the ramp of the one of the Bradleys with the other sergeants in the platoon. The pallid Johnson wears square glasses with thick black frames; he speaks in a monotone and mumbles. He was holding a map with the patrol route marked out in red ink. When he read the names of the streets — Silver, Aeros, Maryland, Delta, Grizzlies, the American names for a grid of broad avenues in Sadr City — the men leaning on the Bradley ramp all gasped. “Grizzlies? Not route Grizzlies. Oh, great, that’s just fucking great,” one soldier said. The crew standing around the Bradley were sick with dread. Butler then asked Johnson directly, “You’re sure about this?”

“Yeah,” Johnson said without looking at him.

“You checked with the commander?”

“Well, it comes from headquarters, so the commander has to know about it.”

“But you’re sure about the route, this is what they gave you?”

Butler was trying to figure out who set up the patrol. Johnson said it wasn’t his idea.

The crews of the four Bradleys in the platoon were watching Butler to see what he would say. Johnson was invisible to them.

“That’s not a good route. I don’t feel good about it,” Butler said to Johnson.

The young lieutenant looked miserable and helpless but didn’t change the plans; he adjusted his glasses. He was only the map bearer, the reluctant middle manager, who knew before he walked out to the crews that over much of the planned route they had been ambushed or hit by roadside bombs. One street on the route is known to be mined with improvised explosives.

Butler instantly understood that the officers in the operations center had given the 1st Platoon the worst patrol in the Shia ghetto, a loop around the entire northern side of the city. It was also a provocative one. The Bradleys would go within blocks of the al-Hekma mosque, a place where the al-Mahdi Army has laid many ambushes and constantly fires at American patrols. This mosque is the pulpit for al-Mahdi Army clerics on Fridays when the street fills with thousands of followers who pray outside in the sun. Angry sermons go out over the loudspeakers while young boys with water sprayers cool the kneeling crowd. Across the ruined avenue from the Hekma mosque someone had spray-painted VIETNAM STREET in tall black letters on a blank stretch of wall.

Al-Mahdi spotters with rifle scopes watch for the approach of American convoys from the roof of the mosque. Farther down the route, Butler would pass through the site of the April 4 ambush, where the men would get out of the vehicles and perform a snap checkpoint. At each of the stops, someone fired a few shots from a rifle. “When you hear that pop-pop from an AK, they are tracking you. That’s how they tell everybody where you are,” a gunner explained. The invisible men were watching us and holding their fire. Three hours later, the cease-fire hadn’t collapsed and Butler’s platoon had only had to endure a hail of rocks thrown by Iraqi boys. They had trouble believing their good luck.

An al-Mahdi Army fighter I know named Muhanned, a young man I met two months ago in a Sadr City safe house, had told me how he was fighting the Americans in the area around the Hekma mosque, the central meeting place for the Mahdi Army leaders. Muhanned is the leader of a cell of young men in his neighborhood who move around, mostly at night, waiting for U.S. patrols and then ambushing them. Muhanned’s technique is to attack and then disappear into the alleyways. When I learned about Butler’s routes through Sadr City, it was clear that there was a connection — Muhanned and his cell were attacking Butler’s company. Butler patrols the area around the mosque, as he has done for months, and Muhanned lives inside Alpha Company’s area of operations, planning and executing ambushes. The two men are joined by the invisible current of the war but they do not know each other. In coming to know both men I cannot shake the feeling that the conflict in Sadr City is nothing more than an unnecessary machine for mass-producing grief.

The vehicles in the Camp Eagle graveyard tell part of the Alpha Company story: Humvees with blown-out windshields, direct hits with rocket propelled grenades on windshields and doors, two burned Bradleys, other Humvees destroyed by roadside bombs. Rocket impacts give the steel a moth-eaten look. The million-dollar equipment is ragged, pushed to the edge from overuse. A number of the soldiers from Alpha Company who were in them during the attacks talk about recurring nightmares, trouble sleeping. Butler said he still had dreams about April 4 and the other bad days that followed. I asked Butler if Iraq was what he expected. “I didn’t think it would be like this. No one is going through what we are going through,” he told me.

On the morning of June 28, the Coalition Provisional Authority announced the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, dissolving itself. It didn’t amount to much beyond a political abstraction for Butler. The only development that matters to him is the cease-fire. Nothing else has changed — he still has to take his platoon out on patrol, he still has to worry about an armed insurgency and ambushes. “They just don’t want us here,” Butler said. “I hope that all of us make it back. I pray that we all do, but I don’t think it could get any worse. This is worse. I’ll do everything I can to bring all the soldiers back. Anything.”

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.

The injured soldier’s doctor, Sudip Bose, is the lanky 30-year-old son of Indian immigrants from Calcutta. He grew up in Illinois and went to Northwestern Medical School, following the path of millions of first-generation Americans into the professional universe. But where others opted for safe careers and high-paying positions in the civilian world, Bose ended up in the middle of a war. When I first spoke to him, he was sitting behind a desk piled high with packaged snacks in an office he also slept in. Bose was distractedly mixing a protein drink, talking about the need to stay in shape. After a few minutes he spent describing his life, it was clear that Bose is an unlikely soldier. In 1996, after his first year of medical school, he took a look at his tuition bill and joined the Army, accepting a deal where the military would pay for a year of education for every year of service.

“It was a tough decision but you have to pay back the debt somehow, and I could have ended up with about $200,000 of debt. My parents were struggling with it. There were a couple of choices; I could work 23 hours a day and pay it off or pay it off at the age of 50. You don’t know what’s going to happen so you don’t know if it’s a good decision or a bad decision. If you lose an arm or a leg it’s a bad decision,” he said without irony. In six years, he reasoned that he would be nearly debt-free, having paid it back in an honorable way by serving the country.

The Army, for its part, took a look at Bose, saw his quick mind and his skill as a surgeon, and sent him to Iraq where he is now treating a steady stream of Americans and Iraqis for an enormous range of injuries, many of them horrifying. Bose also has the distinction of being the only board-certified physician in emergency medicine for 135,000 Americans and an unknown number of Iraqis. He will treat anyone who comes through the door.

I wanted to know what it was like to practice medicine during a war, so I asked to follow Bose to his medical platoon at the forward base in Khadimiya. There I would see what defenders of the war mean when they insist this is a humanitarian endeavor, that U.S. forces are doing good deeds for Iraqis. I witnessed Bose and his colleagues doing their best to help ordinary Iraqis, along with many other soldiers of the 1st Cavalry. But outside the base, their honest attempts were crippled by resentment and mistrust on both sides. Members of the 1st Cavalry couldn’t rely on their Iraqi partners like the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to be a bridge to the local community, because they believe that ICDC forces stationed on their base were betraying them to the resistance. Medical missions out into the local community had to be kept short for security reasons — temporary clinics that should have been available for a full day could only stay open for a few hours because of the threat of attacks, and the U.S. forces were attacked all the time.

The result is predictable. The assistance missions have become a kind of cat-and-mouse game that works like this: Organize a convoy, dart out to an impoverished suburb, provide assistance and then dart back to the base before the resistance finds out about it and fires a volley of rocket-propelled grenades. Whenever the soldiers leave the confines of the forward base in Khadimiya, they are risking their lives to do it, and often the Iraqis are not happy to see them. And yet Khadimiya, unlike Sadr City, is comparatively calm, and is thought to be a hearts-and-minds success story. “They love us here,” one soldier told me. I learned later, after two missions with the 1st Cavalry, what he meant by love was a species of sullen tolerance.

“Watch out for Bose, he brings the rain,” one of the E.R. nurses was telling me just before we got on the convoy to the forward base in Khadimiya. In this scorched climate, we could only hope for rain; the nurse meant that when Bose was around, they were always hit with mass casualties. Rain was bombings, convoy ambushes, nightmare firefights that brought in injured by the dozens. Bose works long hours when the rain comes, performing emergency surgery on the critically wounded. Because the patient load can spike so quickly, he spends his time between the forward base in Khadimiya and the combat support hospital, shuttling back and forth. But there still isn’t enough of him to go around. When the staff of the emergency room talks about him, they always mention his intelligence. Bose, who has a great passion for medicine, gives you the impression of a determined physics student and seems detached at times, slightly dorky. But in five days, I never saw him hesitate over the name of a nerve, small bone or drug. It is not surprising. When Bose took his medical board examinations, he won the highest score in the country. To his colleagues, who have enormous respect for him, he is a star.

On Saturday, June 5, the date we were leaving for the forward base in Khadimiya, Lt. Chris Melendrez, the commander of Bose’s medical platoon, arrived at the combat support hospital. Melendrez was there to pick up Bose and take him back to the base to take care of a soldier with a broken nose. When I met Melendrez, he was professional and focused on getting the convoy together. He called and made sure I was authorized to go back to the base. When I thanked him for taking care of all the details, he said, “Too easy, let’s make it happen,” his catchphrase. Melendrez is like Bose in some respects — a young officer with immigrant parents — but Melendrez is a committed soldier, a believer in the cause. Bose is an intellectual and an accidental soldier, and sometimes the two men might as well be from different planets.

Outside the hospital we piled into armored Humvees. On the ride up to Khadimiya, Bose and I rode in different Humvees, Bose in an armored one. There was very little conversation. Everyone was watching the road and the gunner was watching everything that moved on the street. When we were moving, Iraqi civilians stayed well away from the convoy, and when they didn’t, the soldiers would give them the Iraqi hand signal that means “wait,” an upraised palm with all the fingers brought together. They obeyed, knowing that driving anywhere near the American convoy was dangerous and invited bad luck. We arrived in Khadimiya safely.

After two months in Iraqi Baghdad, I wasn’t prepared for the base. I expected the same bombed-out structures that served as makeshift shelters for the 1st Cav soldiers, but the base wasn’t like that at all. It looked like a typical, pleasant if unusually racially integrated American suburb. If you could forget about the incoming mortars and the war all around it, Banzai Patrol Base was a utopian island. Saddam built his Information Ministry at a bend in the Tigris River, shaded by rows of palms, and it now serves as a place where American soldiers keep fit by running along the graceful roads winding through the campus. Heavy-metal music poured out of the gym next door to the Internet cafe. The soldiers watch movies and MTV, and make discount phone calls home at the local smoothie bar/Internet cafe. At a chapel near the Internet cafe, stacks of camouflage Bibles and plastic rosaries wait for the faithful. Later, when I was thinking about the base, and missing it, I realized that the soldiers who live here will go home to a country that is far more divided than this community. The noisy, tumultuous Iraq of teahouses, sun-beaten men selling propane from donkey carts and black-veiled women struggling down the streets full of brutal traffic had been rendered invisible.

We arrived at the aid station where Bose works as the frontline surgeon, and dropped him off. Lt. Melendrez then offered to take me on a driving tour of the base. Melendrez, who is in his mid-20s and looks like he wouldn’t be out of place on a pro baseball team, has a lot going on. He would reveal his intelligence and sensitivity in the space of a few days, but these are qualities that edged past his adopted persona as a platoon commander. We drove toward a row of single-story buildings, where two Iraqi ICDC trainees were walking down the center of the road, blocking the way. They knew we were behind them, but they didn’t move, keeping their backs toward the car, and this infuriated Melendrez. “See that? They do this kind of thing all the time,” he said. When we finally passed the trainees, there was no acknowledgment, no greeting, which is uncommon for Iraqis. It was the first sign that something was wrong.

I asked Melendrez what he thought of the ICDC recruits. “I don’t trust them farther than I can throw them,” he said with some bitterness. The young officer then told me about the problems they had been having on the base, and said that one senior Iraqi officer, who had been trained by the Americans, had been the target of an arrest raid by the 1st Cav. Melendrez said that the Iraqi officer was accused of plotting against the Americans, but that he disappeared before they could find him. Soldiers on the Khadimiya base talked about the suspect loyalty of the Iraqi forces every day. It reached a peak whenever the base received accurate mortar fire from across the river.

Unlike Bose, who is even-tempered, Melendrez is outraged at the thought that the Americans are being betrayed on their own base. Just thinking about the Iraqi soldiers gets him going. He didn’t like the ICDC, but they were part of the U.S. plan, so he had to work with them. Melendrez wasn’t alone in his take on the Iraqi forces. All of the soldiers I spoke to felt the same way; their distrust of the ICDC verged on hatred.

Melendrez would have to travel with a few of the soldiers he distrusted the next morning on a medical assistance mission to a slum town called Badiat. Badiat was on the outskirts of Baghdad, a village where people farmed poultry and recycled debris. He planned the trip carefully and briefed his people in the evening in his office at the aid station. Melendrez chose the order of the vehicles, the time of departure, the route and who would be going. His men watched while he stood at the white board and went over the mission. The convoy would stop just outside Badiat and they would meet up with the local leader, then continue with him to a local school and set up the temporary clinic. Because there has to be at least one medical officer at the aid station, Dr. Bose elected to stay on the base, and his colleague Lt. Dean Stulz would go instead.

Bose, the brainy outsider, didn’t seem excited about the Badiat mission. He skipped Melendrez’s briefing and hung out in his room in his vast library of packaged food gifts from home. After noticing that the two men kept their distance, I began to think of Melendrez as the anti-Bose, a bearer of prejudices he couldn’t beat, a man who was anything but detached. “You have to be hard with these people,” he said to me, talking about the Iraqis. “That’s what they understand.” Bose would never fall prey to empty wisdom like Melendrez’s comment about the Iraqis, even if he found them to be difficult patients. Bose often treated wounded fighters who came into the emergency room spitting and glaring at the doctors. “You could tell they didn’t want to be there.” It was the harshest comment he made about people who were working hard to kill and maim his friends. Melendrez, who has a short fuse, has much different feelings.

The next morning, guarded by three Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Melendrez’s convoy made its careful way out to Badiat. We turned off the main road onto a dirt track, raising a comet’s tail of dust. A stench came through the windows because we had entered a dump operated by freelance garbage men. Dunes of trash covered the open ground. On the other side of the rotting hills was Badiat. The first Iraqis we saw were middle-aged men straightening rebar on sawhorses. One older man took the bent rebar from a pile and worked the kinks out of it by hand, then put it in a few piles; he was dirty and the sweat ran down his face.

Melendrez got down out of the car, spoke to the rebar-straightener through an interpreter and asked for the local leader. “He’s not here,” the man said and glared at us. It probably wasn’t true, but Melendrez was unfazed and decided to go on to the school. Half a mile down the road, the Bradleys set up a perimeter while Dean Stulz and his medics created a clinic. It took them about 20 minutes before they were ready to see patients. Since the soldiers couldn’t tell the people of Badiat exactly when they were coming for fear of ambushes, citizens emerged from their houses, looking at the armored convoy with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. A Humvee with loudspeakers drove around town advertising the clinic. At first they trickled in, but before long there were at least 150 people waiting for free medical care under the brutal sun.

The very sick arrived an hour and a half later, their families carrying them in somber processions. Lt. Stulz, the steady Minnesotan who volunteered for the Badiat mission, saw more than 40 patients in a three-hour period. I watched most of them come in to see him. The Iraqis filed into the clinic/classroom with various ailments, some life-threatening, where they were treated or comforted and filed slowly out. One diabetic old man walked in with gangrene that had turned five fingers on his hands pitch black. Stulz would make an appeal for emergency surgery for this man when the convoy made it back to the base. Desperate parents brought him children with birth defects, heart murmurs. They kept coming, and Stulz saw them one after the other. Inside the clinic, there were spontaneous demonstrations of joy and gratitude for Stulz and his medics. Outside, however, tempers were fraying.

At the school gates, Melendrez and his soldiers struggled to maintain an orderly line of patients. The people from Badiat asked for water, and to get out of the blazing sun, but the soldiers were hesitant to let them inside the school because they didn’t feel that they could control them. As midday approached, the mood of the crowd turned sour when the Iraqis realized that there was no way everyone could be seen before the 12:30 deadline when the convoy was scheduled to leave. At least once, Melendrez threatened Iraqis trying to push their way past the gates with his baton. When he raised the baton, the crowd would edge back slightly. Women were pleading to get out of the sun, to see a doctor. They petitioned anyone within earshot who would listen. Melendrez finally lost his patience with the crowd and slammed the school gates closed. All the men and women were pushed out of the way, back into the street. It was difficult to watch.

I was outside, standing near the school, when a man named Ahmad Naif said that he wanted the Americans to go away. A young boy who lived nearby lifted his shirt and showed an old bullet wound he said he got from the U.S. soldiers. “They thought I was an Ali Baba,” he said proudly. Ali Baba is the universal term Iraqis use for thieves. Other men in the crowd said they didn’t like the Americans, and at one point a crowd of young boys yelled at the soldiers to leave while their parents tried to silence them. A few minutes before the kids started up, Sgt. Robert Paul, a soldier assigned to a Civil Affairs unit, said, “The insurgents want to attack us and turn the mission into a failure, make it seem like we can’t help anyone without getting people killed.” Paul stood outside and looked at the restive crowd of Iraqis. “See that?” I saw only citizens waiting in the sun. “The ICDC are all inside the walls of the school. That’s not good.” Paul was right, the ICDC were all inside the school where it was comparatively safe.

Just before we left Badiat, the soldiers handed out candy and T-shirts. It was a mob scene. Kids, running, jumping, snatching things from each other. At 12:30 sharp, we climbed back into the vehicles. Back at the base, I fell into an exhausted sleep for the rest of the day.

The medical mission to Badiat was the first of two daytime missions. The second wasn’t medical. On Tuesday, the commander of Charlie Company from Khadimiya was going out on an administrative house call. A young Tennesseean named Patrick McFall was going out to Sobibor north of Baghdad to meet with the Neighborhood Advisory Council on city business because in the absence of a legitimate Iraqi authority, McFall is working as their Irish-American caliph. He was busy trying to award reconstruction contracts and explain how to apply for the ICDC and getting frustrated with the lack of progress. I rode out there in an armored hospital vehicle, which has no air conditioning and is as loud as a jet engine inside. When we arrived at Sobibor, the medics opened the hatch and treated Iraqi kids for various injuries; they dressed wounds and communicated as best as they could without a translator and it took no time at all before a crowd gathered. Soldiers from Charlie Company handed out more candy, which drew more kids.

It was impossible to move around and the mob wanted the notebook I was using, the pen, my watch. You can’t have the watch, the pen, the notebook, I explained. They had a million repeated questions. Mister, where do live? Are you married? Do you have kids? Mister, Whatisyourname? The tall ones squeezed my biceps, testing their strength, tried to sell me Pepsi, forced me to record a speech into a tape player, showed me ancient wounds. They cheered and heckled. Meanwhile, their older relations watched balefully from across the parking lot. The Iraqi child mob swelled and roiled. Not one of them grabbed for my wallet. They were good. Charlie Company threw out more stuff when the mob dwindled. At one point the kids were chanting Bush’s name. I retreated to the steps of the building where McFall was meeting with the local authorities.

Past the gates it was perfectly calm; the kids were outside near the vehicles. On the steps a few soldiers were providing security for the doors. This is where I met a man named Lt. McCarthy from Charlie Company, McFall’s executive officer. I told him I had to take a break from the mob outside. He was sympathetic. “Last time we let about 20 of them inside the gates. Yeah, we did that because the Iraqis don’t shoot at us when there are a lot of kids around.” McCarthy paused for a second, then said, “But don’t write that.” I would hear this once more at Banzai, about children used as an insurance policy against attack. It could have been pure superstition but McCarthy believed it.

As it turned out, the members of Charlie Company had gone out to Sobibor under the threat of an ambush, and they were nervous about what would happen in the town. McFall had taken precautions by placing other vehicles on routes out of Sobibor, while the rest of the convoy circled the town. Not a shot was fired. McFall and his company were out there, exposed, to meet with local leaders who didn’t understand what they were talking about. The men wanted to go home without facing another volley of rocket-propelled grenades.

When the candy was gone, we pulled out.

On the evening after the Badiat mission, a mortar landed and threw out a mushroom cloud of dust, but I only saw this later, after the concussion. I was standing, slightly puzzled in the moment after it landed, near the basketball court for the Khadimiya base. An American soldier ran up to me, all panicked and out of breath and asked me, “Tal Inglisi?” which is rough Arabic for “Do you speak English?” I said I was a reporter from California. “Sir, really sorry. We’re looking for the individual calling in the mortar strikes. He’s around here somewhere.” The soldier ran off, and his buddies were doing the same thing, hoping to catch an Iraqi on a cellphone who was directing the mortar barrage from the base itself.

However they managed it, the insurgents have a perfect fix on their command post. Firing from across the river in A’adamiya, several kilometers away, the shells were landing within feet of the building, throwing shrapnel in every direction. Mortars have even dropped through into the courtyard. After the soldier went off to find his suspect, another mortar exploded close by so we sprinted into the basement of a nearby building. In fact, this was a fairly ordinary day at the base. At Charlie company farther down the road, they didn’t even look up when the shells landed. In this particular barrage, there were no casualties, but soldiers from the base have been seriously injured in recent attacks and medevac’d to the combat support hospital.

Back at the aid station, I asked why the Special Forces didn’t go out and find the insurgents behind the mortar attacks. The answer came back that the zone across the river belonged to another unit. “That’s not us,” the soldier told me. “At one time, we had all eight mortar positions mapped out, but we couldn’t do anything about it.” The man shrugged helplessly. It’s the depressing accuracy of the mortar attacks that makes everyone on the base think there’s a rat on the inside.

Angry sermons from the mosques across the river in A’adamiya came through the soft evening air. The wind mixed up the sound. Night was falling, and the temperature drifted out of the triple digits. Melendrez was hanging out talking to a few of the medics in front of the aid station when he caught sight of a soldier walking down the road in full battle dress. Melendrez couldn’t stop laughing. “Shit. Look, it’s Bose!” Bose had put on his flak jacket, goggles and helmet to walk back from the Internet cafe when everyone else was wearing shorts and T-shirts in the heat. Bose looked like an astronaut and I didn’t recognize him until I could read his nametag. He was in full battle dress because he was worried about mortars that kept landing near the command post he had to skirt on the way to the aid station.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” he said when he walked up. Melendrez looked at him like he was insane. But instead of laughing, all the medics nodded, because they knew it wasn’t a joke. There has been an epidemic of blindings in Iraq. Roadside bombs blow in the windows of the vehicles, destroying soldiers’ eyes. Mortars send out shrapnel that has the same effect. It happens all the time. Bose has a horror of death and he was careful; he was the smart one. The medics who worked with him were fine with Bose all dressed up for his walk across the base. It made sense that he was careful. They needed him.

Melendrez told me about Bose’s soldiering before the Badiat mission. “He’s really smart, but he’s so dumb about the Army.” The platoon commander explained to me that everyone is supposed to qualify on at least one weapons system. “I think he went out with the M16 and finally qualified after seven attempts. They might have said, ‘OK, he passed.’”

I told Bose that I heard he couldn’t shoot. He thought it was incredibly funny, and he laughed. “Yeah, you know, if I have to start fighting, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.” If it bugged Melendrez, who loves the Army, it didn’t bother anyone else.

Later, I asked Bose what upset him the most about practicing medicine in a war zone. “Pronouncing people dead is the most disturbing because they came here just like I did, waved goodbye to someone, expected to be back and then they don’t come back. The blood and guts is OK, I can deal with that, but there is a level of attachment with a patient that is not there in the States. It hits closer to home here. My patients are people in this unit, the people I ate breakfast with that morning and now they’re injured. That has happened. But you just detach and do your job, just detach and do your job.”