Death is just around a corner in Baghdad

While this is going on, other soldiers of the unit christened “Team Assassin” or simply “the Assassins”, kneel at street corners, scanning the rooftops through aviator sunglasses, fingers ready on triggers.

“The hardest part,” says Terry Witt, 24, a serviceman from Florida, “is not knowing who it is or where they’re at. Standing here right now you feel vulnerable. Somebody could shoot. You’d never see it coming.”

On the surface Baghdad seems far less threatening a place than it did in the chaotic days after its fall to coalition forces in April. Although the Americans have yet to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — the original justification for war — they are uncovering vast caches of surface-to-air missiles, guns and explosives.

A search was said to be under way yesterday at a Muslim cleric’s house in Najaf where, an Iraqi informant claimed, banned weapon components were buried in December.

But schools, universities and petrol stations have reopened and ferocious traffic jams, the bustling souk and a thriving real estate market in Baghdad are signs of a city resuming life as normally as can be expected under foreign occupation.

An American-supervised “provisional council” with representatives from racial and religious groups has begun deliberations and the country has so far defied the gloomiest predictions of bloody “balkanisation” and civil unrest in the wake of Saddam’s removal.

American hopes that diehard remnants of the regime would give up the fight were heightened by the killing two weeks ago of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. The pair were buried yesterday by 40 tribesman in a rushed funeral in the village of Awja, on the edge of Tikrit, where Saddam was born.

The resistance has not ended, however. Guerrilla attacks not encountered since the war in Vietnam have killed 53 American servicemen since President George W Bush declared an end to combat operations on May 1. The latest victim died yesterday in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his convoy north of Baghdad.

Others have died in point-blank shootings or have been blown up by bombs dropped from bridges or floated down rivers. There are also countless — and seldom reported — near misses.

The children of the Salhiya district seemed friendly enough as Davis led his men through a warren of pot-holed streets and vacant, weed-choked lots. By the midday call to prayer, the temperature had soared to 114F and the soldiers were sucking water from “camel packs” on their backs. Then a man stepped forward with information about “a bomb” in his back garden.

We advanced through a rubbish-strewn field. Next to a pile of rubble were several rocket heads, some of them dismantled; and next to these were detonators and shavings of plastic explosive. Another local volunteered he had seen two gunmen tinkering about there earlier that morning.

“They were making IEDs here,” said Davis, using the military acronym for “improvised explosive devices” — often bombs placed in empty Coca-Cola tins. A wire leading into the rubble from a contraption in a sack made Davis fear a booby trap, and he radioed the “unexploded ordnance disposal” unit. They were busy, but the site was marked with a red flag and the squad moved on.

American generals say collaboration with the locals has strengthened since the killing of Uday and Qusay. An example came last week when a father turned in his own son, aged 17, who had fired a rocket at a passing Humvee in central Baghdad, wounding a soldier.The father and his friends were appalled: “Those soldiers were very nice guys,” said Salim Saheb Alwan, a 55-year-old retired military officer who witnessed the attack.

Blood-curdling as it may sound, much of the anti-American rhetoric being heard in Iraq is rooted less in real antagonism against the forces of occupation than in the fierce pride of many Iraqi men who feel humiliated and disorientated by the removal of Saddam, for long a symbol of Arab might and a regional rival to Israel.

For all his barbarity, he kept things in order, it is argued, and the same reasoning is now being applied to the American forces. Much as the people of Baghdad complain, most appear happy about the crackdown on looting and crime that accompanied the appointment of Paul Bremer as head of the office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in May. Some Iraqis are beginning to regard the American presence as a necessary bulwark against anarchy.

One exponent of that view is Prince Rabia Mohammed Al-Habib, a leader who commands the unwavering loyalty of hundreds of thousands of gunmen from a patchwork of tribes across Iraq. He is deeply sympathetic to America and just the sort of figure the coalition forces in Baghdad should be trying to make friends with.

He also has a sense of humour, which is just as well considering what happened at his Baghdad residence last Sunday. It was ransacked by US troops who believed that Saddam might be hiding there.

The prince was baffled. He was no friend of Saddam. “I always opposed his policies and he would have chopped off my head were it not for my tribal affiliations,” he said.

The prince, who was not at home when the raid took place, lamented the destruction of furniture in his upstairs rooms. “The soldiers shot at cupboards to open them. Goodness knows why they thought Saddam might have been hiding in a cupboard in my house.”

Worse havoc, however, was wrought by American troops outside on the street. At least five Iraqi civilians were shot dead and others injured after unwittingly penetrating an ill-defined American security cordon as the raid began.

On Tuesday the prince was welcoming into his living room one delegation after another of solemn-faced sheikhs asking his permission to join the jihad against the Americans. The prince was not in the mood for revenge, however. “I’m telling my people not to make a big thing out of it,” he said.

The inhabitants of Fallujah, a city 30 miles west of Baghdad, have not been so understanding, yet a bold new American policy aimed at winning them over appears to be bearing fruit.

A deeply traditional Sunni Muslim city, Fallujah was long considered one of the most hostile places in Iraq. Trouble erupted on April 28 when soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a protest march, killing 16 civilians.

After consultations with the mayor and tribal leaders, American commanders decided to adopt tribal custom in dealing with the problem. They have paid “blood money” of about £1,000 a head to families of the dead or injured, a common way of settling disputes in rural Iraq.

“Things have calmed down a lot since then,” said Taha Bedewi, the mayor, explaining how the Americans had also agreed to withdraw troops from Fallujah to the outskirts of the city; not to search women; and not to frisk local clerics.

Whether or not this is adopted as a model for operations in Baghdad or the rest of Iraq, Davis and his squad are eagerly awaiting the day when they can walk without fear through their district.

At the end of their patrol, they relaxed only when they had passed safely back through the giant, heavily guarded archway — the “mother of all checkpoints”, the Assassins call it — that leads to their base.

They have been told to expect to stay in Iraq for a year. “It’s a long time,” said a young serviceman who was born in Nicaragua. “Just as well I’ve got warrior blood in my veins.”