The Dream Houses of Iraq's Ali Babas

"Who doesn't like orange walls? Everyone likes the color orange," said Mohammed, whose house will be built using stolen materials, on land that does not belong to him. Grinning happily, the 45-year-old sailor waved a plan of his house, which he had an engineer draw up for about $8.

In Basra, there is an atmosphere of teeming industry and frantic activity. Trucks piled high with bricks race around; donkeys drag carts laden with huge metal pylons and rods; and people are chalking out plans for foundations on the dirt and putting up walls for houses as fast as they can -- before a new authority materializes to tell them to stop.

Basra's building boom has a crazy air. Virtually everything is stolen: the bricks, the mortar, the tiles -- even the land.

At some homes under construction, honestly purchased prewar bricks are topped by stolen bricks of another color, giving the houses a striped appearance. Once these illegal dwellings are built, the squatters plan to hook their own wires into the electricity lines, tap into phone lines and connect pipes to the water system.

In the meantime, they can use firewood to cook: the trees in the parks and along traffic islands are being chopped back to ugly stumps by locals looking for fuel.

There's a name for this wave of collective kleptomania. Locals call the looters "Ali Babas," and one hears the cry echoing around the streets. "Ali Baba! Ali Baba!"

To people like Mohammed, this new kind of freedom is dizzying.

"It's the best opportunity I ever had in my life. This is a good chance to do anything, because everything is cheap and you can do it without permission," he said, explaining that he had taken a piece of land in the south of the city.

"I knew no one would come and stop me because there's no government. I'm hurrying to finish it before a new government comes."

Some looters who took to the streets after British troops captured the city this month were so ashamed that they returned stolen items to the mosques. Some mosques resemble big parking lots, full of buses, ambulances, tractors, forklifts, digging equipment and other government vehicles, all returned in the last few days after being stolen.

But the looting goes on day and night. After the wild early days, when every last fitting was stripped from public buildings, people have become a little more creative and are systematically plundering the factories on the outskirts of the city.

In the Rashid Bank, people drilled narrow holes into floor vaults and lowered children in to hand out the money. Two children who were still in the vaults suffocated when looters set the bank on fire.

The Central Bank manager here declined the British military's offer to remove the money in the vaults -- about 87 million dinars -- for safekeeping, insisting that his vaults were impregnable. A huge explosion early Saturday proved him wrong.

The 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards raced to the scene. "We found about 500 locals just running rampage. It was like ants. There was money everywhere. Some had it packed into [garbage] bags. Some had it in their trousers. We apprehended 57 suspects inside the bank," British Lt. William Hawley said.

He said there was a shootout in the bank between two rival families who were both trying to break into the vaults. By the time the troops arrived, all they found were pools of blood.

"Many people are so poor and having their first sense of freedom, they think, 'I need to get as much as I can as quickly as I can,' " Hawley said. It's not clear how much was stolen.

Some looters are very poor, like Vajem Abas, trudging along the road with a trolley of shabby metal furniture, his shoes so old that one sole flapped open like a book, revealing grubby toes.

Everyone in Basra seems to be in a hurry: They have to deliver their load quickly and get back to take more. The people building houses stake out their plots on government land with white chalk, build shallow foundations and pile up the brick walls, with alarmingly little mortar, as fast as they can.