The Rough Guide to Baghdad (Page 4)

At Sadr City's Al Jawadir hospital the halls are crowded with worried-looking men and women. An emaciated, greenish man is wheeled by on a gurney. Here one clearly sees the social impact of the sewer problem and the general chaos of which it is a subset.

The hospital director, Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, explains that the hospital serves at least a million and a half people and sees 3,000 patients a day, but suffers for lack of adequate medicine, equipment, clean water and security. "We have to get clean water shipped in," he says. "A German NGO delivers it in a tanker truck." Typhoid is rampant, he adds, and an outbreak of hepatitis E is gathering momentum, with forty new cases a week. "The coalition promises money and supplies, but there is never enough," says the director. "I am forced to reuse needles and deny people anesthesia. We only do serious emergency surgeries."

Upstairs on one of the wards we meet a 25-year-old internist named Ali Kadhem. Like many doctors, he speaks English. His face is open and boyishly innocent, and he possesses an understated yet intense personal charisma. When he talks, the other doctors and orderlies listen and watch.

Ali says gunmen enter the hospital demanding special treatment for relatives. Two weeks ago an addict pulled a pistol on him and stole morphine. One doctor was shot right in front of the hospital by thieves. He says that since April, US troops have raided the wards on three different occasions, looking for wounded Jeshi Mahdi fighters.

"They interrogated the wounded and searched in a very rough way and tore down religious posters," says the young physician. Several wounded Mahdi men, as well as civilians, have fled the hospital in fear of the raids.

"I know that some of these people died because they hid in their homes and we could not treat them," says Ali. "We could have saved them. The cause of all these problems is the Americans. We need for them to go."

The Mahdi's fighting in Karbala and Najaf, provoked in large part by US assaults, alienated huge swaths of the mainstream Shiite community--particularly the merchant class that depends on pilgrim traffic to the holy cities. But spend a day or two in Al Thawra and it's not hard to understand why people follow Muqtada al-Sadr. He is a junior religious scholar, unlike his father, who was an ayatollah, but Muqtada's leadership is primarily political, and his following, likewise, is Shiite but religiously diverse. His power is rooted in his willingness to oppose the occupation openly, just as his martyred father opposed Saddam.

More practically, he is followed because the branches of his organization deliver a slim modicum of order and stability to a few parts of Baghdad and cities farther south. In front of the hospital a man named Uda Mohame explains the logic: "Everyone cooperates with the Jeshi Mahdi. There are no police here, no government. The Mahdi direct traffic, they fix things, they do all the work."

At the Sadr office on one of Al Thawra's main streets, I try to meet Muqtada's local representative, a 29-year-old sheik named Hassan Edhary, but he is on the run. The First Cav wants him, dead or alive. His two predecessors are already in Abu Ghraib. A few weeks ago, US tanks blew up this office. Reconstruction started the next day at dawn.

"Little boys cleaned the bricks while men rebuilt," explains a local man named Samir.

Now the walled compound, draped in black banners mourning the dead and topped with big fluttering green-and-black flags, looks as good as new. The men here are all Mahdi but they are unarmed by day. There can be no formal interviews, I am told, without the sheik's permission.

For the better part of a week I return again and again looking for Sheik Edhary, but he's still on the lam. As I am leaving the office after one failed attempt, a young Mahdi man says to me, "Look, the Americans attack us. That is why we fight. We have a right to respond."

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