In the New Iraq, a Neighborhood Tells the Story

A new day dawns over the sleepy neighborhood known as Muhallah 665. The dappled sunlight, pink in the dusty haze, casts long shadows over houses with grandiose touches -- a high arch here, a Doric column there, a balustraded balcony.

Before the war, this neighborhood of northwest Baghdad was a well-ordered enclave where favors and privileges went hand in hand with support -- obsequious, often humiliating support -- for Saddam Hussein.

An elaborate system of rewards and punishments prevailed. Land was given to army officers and intelligence agents, who built large and modern houses. For the faithful among the 14,000 residents, there were bonuses, awarded on the numerous state and Baath Party holidays. For the politically suspect, there was prison, torture and impoverishment.

On this new day, life in Muhallah 665 is changed utterly.

Freed of the dictator they had been forced to love by a country they had been taught to hate, neighbors face the day suspended between hope and fear.

Members of Hussein’s Fedayeen still live in secret here, plotting against the Americans. They make their presence felt with the anti-U.S. pamphlets they leave on neighborhood doorsteps, and the roadside bombs they are suspected of leaving along nearby highways. A few high-ranking Baath Party bureaucrats are around too, cloistered, waiting to see if the new authorities will ever come to arrest them.

And a coterie of gray-haired former army colonels and generals, now out of work and bitter about the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces, gathers each evening around wooden tables in a back corner of the market to play dominoes and talk about how the new rulers don’t know anything about anything.

But others celebrate. Onetime enemies of the regime and former political prisoners are overjoyed that Hussein is gone and his sons, Uday and Qusai, have been killed.

An ambitious young Shiite mullah has appropriated the old local Baath Party headquarters and refashioned it into a mosque, community center and clinic. Like other members of the country’s Shiite Muslim majority, for the first time in his life he feels empowered.

The neighborhood’s newest residents are at its eastern edge, across a busy four-lane street along which peasant women are sometimes seen foraging for grass for their animals, piling it high on donkeys, and where a makeshift market has sprung up to sell bricks and sand and other building materials.

There, behind an earthen barrier topped by barbed wire, U.S. soldiers occupy a group of half-finished brick houses once meant for privileged members of Hussein’s regime. They are about 600 members of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, the Red Falcons out of Ft. Bragg, N.C., eager to go home but striving to stay focused on -- in their terminology -- “the mission.”

With the soldiers and the mullah, the embittered and the optimistic, Muhallah 665 is a cross-section of the old and new, the good and bad, the ups and downs of the new Iraq.

It is in ordinary neighborhoods such as this that the war for Iraqi support is being waged by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. For the moment, at least, it is a struggle. Among both supporters and opponents of Hussein, there is overwhelming frustration.

Most in Muhallah 665 -- Neighborhood 665 -- had expected things to be better under the Americans. But eight months after U.S. forces entered Baghdad, services providing electricity, telephones, gasoline and cooking fuel have yet to be restored to prewar levels.

People thought they would at the very least be safe on their streets, and not beset by fears of robbery, kidnapping and civil disorder.

They thought they would have an Iraqi government instead of a hodgepodge of U.S. civil and military rule, locally appointed councils, interim ministers and a Governing Council that exercises little independent authority.

Like the rest of Iraq, the people of Muhallah 665 live in limbo. Some hold grudges or nurse wounds that fester. Others, despite the hardships and uncertainty, rouse themselves to face the future.

This is a neighborhood like many in Baghdad, laid out in a simple grid of nameless, numbered streets, just wide enough for cars to park. The homes are hidden behind walls, but sometimes flowers, shrubs and date palms rise above the concrete, hinting at inviting gardens, and the stories inside.

The Widow

Walk along Street 22 to house No. 9 with its drab metal gate. You’ll find a little girl called Amad. She is 4 years old, has short brown hair and sad, dark eyes.

Sometimes she stands by herself, talking to the sky. If you ask, she will say she is talking to her daddy, telling him to come home. He won’t. He died fighting in the war against the Americans -- and for Hussein.

The changes in Iraq can be charted by how far the old elite has fallen. Amad’s mother, Hawaa Saeed Kadhim, a demure, dark-haired woman of 33, felt the changes more violently than most.

In a single day, she lost her husband, her money and her car. From a cosseted, privileged wife of someone in the inner circle of the Baathist regime, she was transformed into a pauper.

Kadhim does not apologize for her life as the spouse of an aide to Uday Hussein. Uday was a violent monster, but her husband had no choice but to serve him, she says. Disloyalty was severely punished -- as her husband’s colleagues used to say, “God forgives, but not Uday.”

Ahmad Hamid Ismail was only 19 when he went to work for Uday in 1986. He had enrolled in a religious college, and then transferred to a military academy, graduating as a promising young officer. He was assigned to be a companion to the president’s son, who was about his age.

Ismail married Hawaa a year after that. She was only a girl herself at 17, from an educated family. The match seemed fortuitous. Ismail was handsome, intelligent and -- although his salary was not lavish -- he had the chance to make more money by selling goods he bought abroad on frequent shopping sprees for Uday. “On his birthdays, all the inner circle, including my husband, would go to Paris and buy everything -- perfumes, shirts, ties, shoes, even underwear -- for presents for him,” she says.

But Uday was a dangerous boss. She remembers going to a ball with her husband at the Al Rashid Hotel in 1993. During the party, she says, she saw Uday take out a pistol with a silencer attached and shoot a woman in the back of the head. The body was removed from the room in front of 400 guests. The party continued.

When she later asked her husband why Uday had killed the woman, he told her not to ask.

Hawaa and Ismail had two children, and as this year’s war approached, she was pregnant with their third.

Ismail was ordered to fight with Fedayeen defending Saddam International Airport. Hawaa saw him the last time when he came home on a one-day leave, five days after their first son, Omar, was born by caesarean section. It was a bitter parting. Her husband did not want to fight but could not avoid it, she says. “They would have killed him.”

The battle for Baghdad in the first week of April didn’t reach Muhallah 665, but residents could hear the fierce fighting at the airport southwest of them, and the bombing of Iraqi army installations to the west. They huddled indoors in the dark, children crying, as the bombs fell. They ventured outdoors when the bombing stopped, but most were afraid to leave their own street.

Unlike many regular army troops, Ismail did not quietly abandon his post -- he feared Uday too much. He lost part of his right leg to a cluster bomb as U.S. forces closed in on the airport, colleagues told Hawaa later. Iraqi doctors in a crowded military hospital operated on him without medicine, and he was bleeding badly. But as the U.S. Army entered central Baghdad, the hospital was evacuated. Ismail managed to get himself into the street but passed out and died before he could reach another hospital, she was told.

Thieves got his car, which had been used by his comrades to drive him to the hospital. In it was the family’s savings -- 10 million dinars, about $6,500. When Hawaa received news that her husband was dead, she had an infant less than a week old; the 4-year-old, Amad; and 16-year-old Anis, who was to become her mainstay.

She had no protector -- her parents were dead, her only brother blind. Three other brothers had been killed in Iraq’s war with Iran. She already had lost her house in one of Uday’s habitual acts of cruelty. Ismail had been allowed to drive a car from Uday’s vast collection, a Toyota sedan. When it was stolen, Uday demanded Ismail replace it with another car five times as valuable -- or he would cut off Ismail’s hands. Ismail and Hawaa sold their home to pay the debt.

Hawaa had nowhere to turn. She began to sell their possessions -- a sofa suite for $150, a dining room set for $200.

She moved from the high-rent apartment she had shared with Ismail into a few bare rooms she could have for $25 a month. When the landlord began to make romantic advances and threatened to raise the rent, she moved again -- into another family’s house down the street.

An old, thin sofa covered with a throw rug is her main furniture, but her walls offer testimony to a former affluence -- a fancy clock and several pictures of her husband in ornate frames. In one, he bends to shake the hand of Uday, who is dressed in traditional Arab robes and reclining in bed recovering from a 1997 assassination attempt.

The parents of her elder daughter’s classmates, aware of her plight, give her small gifts. Aside from that, she has no income and lives on the food-ration basket all Iraqis receive. She has gone around asking for work, as a bookkeeper or a teacher, but the few available jobs generally go to people who worked before the war.

Hawaa acknowledges that she and her husband benefited from a cruel regime, but she contends that they weren’t wrong to take what could be had -- and that they weren’t alone.

Even though she profited from her husband’s connection to the brutal and tyrannical Uday, she is viewed by her neighbors with sympathy -- too many others have been similarly implicated.

“Everywhere I go, people feel sorry for me because I have three children, but so far they do nothing,” she says.

The events of the past six months have left her numb. When Uday and Qusai were killed in the northern city of Mosul in July, she felt nothing but mild surprise that they would let themselves be caught.

She says she feels a vague hurt when she sees the troops of the 82nd Airborne living in her neighborhood. In the next moment, however, she asks an American to tell the U.S. commander in the area about her situation -- maybe he could help.

“I wish our kids could maintain the same standard of living that we had before, because it is too difficult to live,” she says. “When I finish everything at night, I wonder how I will go on.

“Before, I was strong. But now I am alone, and I feel I am too weak to face these difficulties.”

She would like to remarry but realizes she is not a good prospect -- a penniless widow with three children.

“We have a proverb that says that ‘everything has gathered.’ All problems have gathered. All at one time.”

The Prisoner

A few blocks away, on Street 25, House No. 44, Sadoun Abdul Ameer is cheerily fixing up his small concrete house. He has finished painting and plastering inside, and on a wall has hung a 100-year-old Iranian rifle, its stock decorated with silver disks. An heirloom, it symbolizes that there is more than a little fight in the 43-year-old -- even though he appears to be at peace. He is grateful to Americans, but like others, he wants them to leave.

A smell of wet plaster wafts in the air as his children fetch white plastic chairs for guests. The floor is just poured concrete. White ceramic tiles will be added later to the three-room house.

Ameer’s wife, Sahira, diminutive and several months pregnant, hovers in the background with the couple’s three children. She built this house but is not complaining about her husband’s redecoration. It is good to have him home again.

Now a bit stout, looking distinguished with a short graying beard and neatly combed-back hair, he had spent five years in Abu Ghraib prison on the western edge of Baghdad before his release last year. He was sent there as a political prisoner in 1997, convicted of belonging to an illegal political party.

Ameer looks at his wife gratefully. While he was being starved and beaten by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen, she kept the family together in the face of poverty and humiliation. With her black, foot-pedaled sewing machine, she eked out a meager living.

The ordeal of Sadoun and Sahira Ameer began in 1996. He was a prosperous cigarette wholesaler, and they lived in a large southwest Baghdad home. One day that summer, four agents came to the house and took him away. Even now, he does not know if his arrest was motivated by someone’s envy -- cigarettes was a hard-knuckled business -- or because of his political activities.

It is true he was a secret opponent of Hussein. He had helped draft a communique in response to the massacres carried out against Shiites who rose against Hussein in 1991, wrongly believing that the tyrant who favored his own Sunni minority was too weakened after the Persian Gulf War to survive.

Ameer joined a cell that called for a united Islamic movement to oppose the “criminal regime.” It was foolhardy, and he cannot explain why he had the courage to do it. For more than a year, Ameer and 14 others rounded up with him were beaten, starved and interrogated.

Then, a special court was convened on July 2, 1997, to convict them. The proceedings lasted less than an hour. Ten of the men were swiftly executed. Ameer remembers their poignant parting -- “Go with God,” they told each other. Perhaps because Ameer never confessed, and there was scant evidence against him, he was spared. The revolutionary court sentenced him to 15 years. He was transported to Abu Ghraib in an ice cream truck.

From the day of his arrest, Sahira began a quest to find him. She visited every official she could think of and wrote increasingly humble and plaintive letters to the intelligence service. No one even acknowledged he was in custody. She feared he had been killed.

“Please sir, I have no other choice before me but to address your good self for assistance,” begins one letter she sent to the director of Iraqi intelligence on Jan. 18, 1997. “Until now I have received no information about [my husband’s] whereabouts. Please, sir, I have children and I have no one to look after them in the difficult straits through which our dear country passes.... For your information, I descend from a decent family all of whose members are among the children of the revolution and of the beloved leader, Saddam Hussein, may God protect him.”

Showing the handwritten letter now, she is embarrassed by its servile tone but says it was the only way to approach the authorities. Her protestations of loyalty may have worked; afterward, she finally received confirmation that her husband was a prisoner, and soon had her first chance to visit him.

“I did not recognize him, he was so thin,” she says of that meeting. From a weight of 165 pounds, he had dwindled to about 100.

During interrogation, Ameer recounts now, he was suspended by his arms and shocked. His sadistic questioners beat his hands and threatened to pull out his fingernails. He was nearly starved. There were two small meals a day -- sometimes only bits of date or an onion and one piece of stale bread.

His sentence had also called for the confiscation of all his property. Sahira and the children lost their house. His entire cigarette inventory worth 300 million dinars -- $200,000 -- was seized, although Sahira managed to retain some personal possessions she could sell. Even the family’s monthly food ration was reduced because Ameer was no longer living with them.

After staying briefly with relatives, Sahira used the money she had scraped together to buy concrete blocks and began to build a house on a 1,000-square-foot plot in Muhallah 665 that she had inherited from a relative. At first, she and the children lived in the open. And for the most part they were shunned. They were Shiite, impoverished, and her husband was in prison for anti-regime activities. It was not a recipe for making friends, especially where many neighbors were military and intelligence officers from Sunni tribes rewarded for their loyalty to Hussein.

Nevertheless, Sahira struggled on. She made dresses for the women of the neighborhood. They would mock her and upbraid her and underpay her, she says, but they kept returning because of her skill.

“We had no furniture whatsoever,” she says. “Just this sewing machine to make my living.... In winter, we all gathered together to be warm. For two years, we had no electricity or water inside, and we borrowed an electricity line from the neighbors. Some days we ate. Some days we had nothing.”

The children suffered taunting in school from teachers as well as classmates because of Ameer’s imprisonment. Daughter Ola says classmates would call her father a thief, and she would defend him as a political activist.

The family was reunited when Hussein suddenly released all prisoners from Abu Ghraib, in an apparent bid to garner support from his own people as war clouds were gathering. Ameer was free.

He did not even know where Sahira and the children were living, so he went by bus to his father’s house. “All my friends were celebrating my release, but I was thinking about them. I was impatient,” he says.

Sahira, meanwhile, had heard on the radio that prisoners were free.

“I shouted with joy,” she says. “I went into the street and threw candy.” Then she went to find him.

While her husband was in prison, the only neighbor to befriend her was Majda al Taie, the wife of Hussein functionary and intelligence officer Kadhim al Taie. When Majda learned that one of Sahira’s children was having a birthday, she surprised the child with a cake and began doing other things for Sahira. They became friends, and when Ameer got out of prison, he thanked the Al Taies.

When the war reached Baghdad last spring and Al Taie took his family to his home village near Babylon, Ameer watched over their property on Street 2, at House No. 1. And since then, Ameer has offered his protection in case anyone threatened Al Taie because of his connection to the former government.

Today, Kadhim considers Ameer his best friend. Sahira and Majda talk every day. They may have been on different sides of Hussein’s regime, but both families are Shiite in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood. Each feels a debt of gratitude to the other that transcends politics.

“This type of loyalty may not be available in your country,” Ameer says. “There are still old traditions in our country -- maybe not as strong as they once were, but they exist. And one of them says, ‘Even the seventh neighbor should be treated like one of your family.’ ”

The Baathist

Abdul Qadir Naass al Suweidi, 62, who lives around the corner, has become invisible. Until April 9, the day Baghdad fell, he was one of the country’s most powerful bureaucrats, a director-general in the national secretariat of the Baath Party working in the regime’s inner sanctum providing party directives to the government. Much as Communist Party chieftains used to ride roughshod over Soviet state officials, a word from Suweidi would be sufficient to make government ministers quake.

Even now, the balding Suweidi seems to scowl at those around him. He spends his days brooding. He keeps to his large, imposing house, decorated with blue glazed tiles, surrounded by a score of sons and daughters and grandchildren. He receives visitors at a table in his front garden, drawing angrily on his Caravan brand cigarettes.

When Suweidi ventures out, it is in a simple white dishdasha (the ankle-length tunic traditionally worn by Iraqi men), often walking with a grandson to the market, still expecting -- and receiving -- deference from those he encounters.

In his world, everything the Americans have done is wrong, and everything Saddam Hussein has done is justifiable.

“Life is difficult these days,” he says. “The people are suffering from cuts in electricity and in water. Add to that the state of the unemployed. Most citizens are jobless, especially since most people are used to living on a government salary. Finally, the question of security is affecting life in all its dimensions.”

He cannot understand why the American-led occupation authority is unwilling to pay him or any other top Baathist a salary, which he considers his due after 40 years of loyal service to the party.

When there is a change in administration in the United States, he asks, blithely ignorant of American political life, do all the party workers stop getting paid? It also rankles that he cannot visit his old office, in the Republican Palace compound, which is now the headquarters of the chief civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer III.

When asked about the crimes of the Hussein regime, including the torture of his own neighbor Ameer and the mass graves of Shiites, Suweidi says flatly, “It is exaggerated.” When pressed by someone who has seen the graves and talked to the torture victims, his face hardens. “Every government has enemies, and when it does, it must think of terminating them,” he says. “It is natural to terminate the enemies of a regime.”

To him, Iraq had its laws and rules, and those who broke them deserved whatever was meted out. “Every citizen, every human being who is an outlaw should be judged by the laws of his own country.”

He is much more eager to talk about American wrongs. “Let me ask you something. Why did the Americans invade Iraq? What did they want from us?” Weapons of mass destruction were a pretext, he contends, and have not been found. And the stated goal of saving Iraqis from a dictatorship is too altruistic, he says.

It was for the oil and for the sake of Israel, he believes, but the cost will be greater than America expected, he says.

“The resistance escalates day after day because the Iraqis do not want to be colonized,” he says. “We reject being the slaves of others.”

Eventually, he believes, the U.S. forces will find the cost too high. “I do expect that one day the Baath Party will control power again in Iraq,” he says. “The Baath Party represents a very large sector of Iraq, and this is a fact.”

The Sheik

Power in Muhallah 665 used to emanate from a nondescript square building on a side street half a mile from the market -- the district Baath Party headquarters. It had offices for party bigwigs, files on residents and even its own detention cells. Today, there’s a sign out front with a blue dome and the words Masjad Islam -- the Temple of Islam.

Here, the power of the party has been supplanted by the power of Islam -- specifically, the Shiite branch of Islam.

A 25-year-old cleric from the neighborhood, Sheik Wisam al Fawadi, was the agent of the change. Up until the last days of the war, he was a political prisoner, having been arrested several months earlier on suspicion of being a subversive. When he was freed, he rushed to his neighborhood and found looters at the party headquarters. He claimed the building in the name of the Hawza, the Shiite religious leadership of Iraq, and in the name of God.

Fawadi is an arresting figure, dressed in a long black robe and white turban, with bronze-colored skin, a short black beard, penetrating eyes and heavy black eyebrows that connect like a thick line of charcoal. He speaks with a calm dignity that belies his youth.

Surrounded by acolytes, he receives visitors with formality in the former party secretary’s office, which he has decorated with photographs of revered ayatollahs and sayings of the prophet Muhammad in frames made of seashells. Nevertheless, there is a part of him that does not quite believe his good luck -- that the takeover and transformation of the party headquarters into his own husseiniya, or Shiite mosque, is real.

In the first chaotic days after the war, as looting was threatening to reduce Baghdad to ashes, the amorphous Hawza laid claim to almost every public institution in the capital -- hospitals, schools, libraries, police stations and party buildings -- in a bid to staunch the destruction. As GIs and Marines and civil administrators began to make their presence felt, the Hawza gradually surrendered most of the installations.

In late April, U.S. troops in the neighborhood told Fawadi that the party building was public property and that he and his followers would have to move out. But the order was never enforced.

Just in case, Fawadi has a short letter -- in English -- that he says is from the interim government’s religious endowments council, listing the building as a mosque. He hopes it will dissuade any eviction attempt.

Some of Fawadi’s followers are also squatting in the building, and they have established a health clinic for the poor.

For Fawadi, the takeover of the Baath Party headquarters is a matter of justice. Shiites were discriminated against by the former regime, he says, and there were no mosques assigned to Shiites in the neighborhood, even though a significant portion of its residents -- he does not know how many -- are Shiite.

Fawadi is often seen walking in the neighborhood on some errand or another, his black robe billowing behind him. He grew up just five blocks away. He is on cordial but guarded terms with the U.S. forces here.

“Escodan? He is my friend,” he says of Capt. Joseph Escodan, the crew-cut paratroop officer put in charge of Muhallah 665 by his commander, Lt. Col. Eric Nantz.

The U.S. troops potentially have a strong ally in Fawadi, who opposes the Sunni grandees and former Baathists in the neighborhood who form the bulk of sullen opposition to the Americans. He feels the Americans fail to appreciate that.

In fact, Fawadi is still smarting about his arrest at their hands.

According to his account, a Baathist made false charges against him, saying that Fawadi had threatened women who do not wear the hijab, or Muslim scarf. Fawadi says he preached in favor of the hijab but threatened no violence.

Americans came to the mosque, handcuffed him and made him bow his head to the ground, Fawadi says. “This harms my dignity,” he says. “They degraded and demeaned me.”

He says he was put in an Army vehicle and driven to the U.S. compound nearby, where he was questioned for several hours. Fawadi was soon released, but he remains bitter. “This is the same treatment that was used by Saddam’s security department,” he says.

Although the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is difficult to bear, Fawadi and other Shiite clerics are holding back their protests. But if the Hawza puts out the word to resist the Americans by force, Fawadi says, he would follow the instructions.

“I feel that the Americans, the respectful ones anyway, the officers, want to find solutions for everything and to help,” he says. “Sometimes they fail, but mainly they help. For now, their presence here is creating a parity and a balance. But when security prevails -- and nothing is more dear to us -- I think we would like, and the Americans too would like, for them to go home to their families.”

He is aware of the challenges facing the GIs who are his new neighbors. With his network of about 100 followers in the neighborhood, he believes he knows who is behind some of the shadowy attacks against the Americans. His followers tell him it is a mixture of Baathists and Wahhabis -- Sunni Muslim fundamentalists -- who are planting explosives almost daily along the main highways that carve out the boundaries of the district.

The secular Baathists normally do not like the religiously austere Wahhabis, and the feeling is mutual, Fawadi says. But they are working together now because they have a common goal: to rid the country of U.S. forces.

“They have agents here,” he says darkly. “We find their leaflets here and there in the streets.”

The attackers are contemptible, in his view.

“These people have no scruples,” he says. “They were enjoying lives of privilege before. Now they have no object in life, no hope for the future. So they will do anything to try to get back their places.”

The Officer

Lt. Col. Nantz and his Red Falcons wear a patch on their shoulders with two A’s -- for All-American -- and in conversation they project a beguiling blend of self-sacrifice and patriotism.

They have traveled far to patrol nine dusty neighborhoods of western Baghdad, Muhallah 665 among them. Some of their job is mundane -- overseeing the restoration of bridges and clogged sewer lines, and making sure that the market that sells propane gas is functioning. But some is adrenalin-filled -- chasing after the rebels who lob mortar rounds and plant roadside bombs.

They drove in from Kuwait in late March, getting hit with enemy fire as soon as they arrived in the southern city of Samawa. They held on and defended supply routes heading north, and finally entered Baghdad. Then, on April 23, they assumed control of Fallouja, the city that would become the hottest battle zone between the Army and the pro-Hussein insurgency.

There, trouble hit. On the night of April 28, people were firing weapons in the air “like popcorn popping” and marching to protest the presence of U.S. troops, Nantz says. He drove through town issuing warnings to disperse and cease firing. But one knot of people formed again, gathering steam as it marched toward the school where troops were stationed. Soldiers on the roof of the school came under attack, the Army says, a statement the people in Fallouja dispute. Perceiving their lives at risk, the soldiers fired. According to residents, 17 Iraqis died. Although the action of the troops was endorsed up the chain of command, the Red Falcons were moved. And that is how Nantz inherited part of Baghdad, parking his battalion near the minarets of Hussein’s grandiose Mother of All Battles Mosque.

Since then, two major car bombings -- an attack on the Jordanian Embassy and the suicide bombing of the Al Kudra police station -- have rocked Nantz’s area. And two of his men -- Spc. Douglas J. Weismantle, 28, of Pittsburgh, and Pfc. Jose Casanova, 23, of El Monte -- died when an Iraqi truck rolled over on their Humvee in a traffic accident.

But compared with Fallouja, it is quiet here. Nantz, 40, a soft-spoken North Carolinian with a buzz haircut, usually wears sweat-stained desert camouflage, with a flak jacket and helmet when he leaves the base. He keeps up a busy round of municipal council meetings and other civic and military duties with the aid of a hand-held computer datebook, and takes pride in the fact that his chunk of Baghdad is getting safer by the day, at least for Iraqis.

For U.S. soldiers, he acknowledges, it is more dangerous, with casualties in Iraq steeply higher in November than in previous months. Recently, his base came under mortar shelling for the first time, although the two rounds landed outside the perimeter. But the number of IEDs -- improvised explosive devices -- is going down in the area. Even in the case of the mortar attack, there was a silver lining: Residents stepped forward the next day and helped Nantz’s troops find the hidden mortar tube, left half-buried in the soil.

“You have a mix in this town, and you probably have less than 1% out there actively engaged in trying to do harm to U.S. soldiers,” he says. “Among the rest of the population, some support us 100%, some are neutral, and some want us to leave but are not actively engaged in terrorist activities. It is just a hodgepodge of opinions and attitudes.

“Our strategy is, we really work on maintaining basic support. We want those who are neutral to stay neutral, or to come to our side of the fence,” he says.

“And I am sure some people have already changed their attitudes.”

Nantz recalls one Iraqi asking him if he has children, and if he wouldn’t rather be home with them than occupying a foreign country. In fact, he has three children: two boys, 11 and 5, and a 10-year-old girl. He calls them the “unsung heroes.”

Nantz’s voice grows quiet. “It would be difficult for me to be here if I didn’t believe in the cause,” he says. “Everybody here is sacrificing in some way. I believe that is because it’s our turn.

“In a large part, the reason I am here is because of my children,” he says. “Because I believe that if we have a stable Iraq, then my children could have a better place to grow up in the United States.”

The cost since the start of their deployment in February has been high for his soldiers, he says.

“Fifteen soldiers have had to redeploy because of combat injuries, and many others because of accidents in a combat environment,” he says. “Some of these soldiers are still struggling with their injuries, and four great Americans from my command will not return to their family and friends. I take that personal.

“Freedom isn’t free.... It must be earned, or it will never be obtained and it will not be kept.”

It is nearly dusk, and the light is fading. Another day in the new Muhallah 665 is ending, and the sound that comes through the open door is the turning engines and rattling gravel of a pair of Humvees returning from patrol.

The American officer, defending a neighborhood where some people are grateful, others are resentful and many merely tolerate his presence, says goodnight, and walks away.