"With the Mahdi Army, we understand their language. If they don't do something for us, we'll complain to the Sadr office," said Karim Abed, a driver and 42-year-old father of six. "How do we complain to the Americans? Whom do we complain to?"
Other men pointed out what the militia was doing: Its workers had jobs on the U.S.-funded projects, and it was providing protection to the engineers, some of whom had been kidnapped by criminal gangs. For months, they said, the militia was organizing lines at the gas stations, stopping price gouging, at times thuggishly. The U.S. military eventually forced the militiamen to leave.
A U.S. soldier provides security at a Sadr City gas station while Iraqis wait in line. Residents say militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr were organizing such lines until the U.S. military forced them to leave.
(Reuters)
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"The Sadr office wants to help us, but the Americans won't let them," said Dhia Ahmed, a 21-year-old whose family owns the store, where a picture of Sadr hung on a refrigerator next to a poster of a Shiite saint. "The Americans don't respect other people."
"The Sadr office is trying to serve the people," said a friend, Abdullah Muhsin. "They work for nothing in return."
They talked of other slights, communicated by Sadr's men in the sermons that draw thousands every Friday and then pass through the neighborhood by word of mouth as a mix of rumor and fact. They suggested the streets were being newly paved so that U.S. tanks could pass over them. They said the Americans had prevented the militia from protecting the city's churches and mosques. They insisted that U.S. troops were here for their own interests. When pressed about what those interests were, Muhsin shot back, "Ask them." Then he and the others settled on an explanation heard often in Baghdad these days: "It is a crusade against a Muslim country."
On the street outside, men hammered battered sheets of metal, collecting them for scrap. Horns blared. A dead rat sat in a pile of trash not yet swept up from the road -- scraps of fetid green lettuce mixing with rotting watermelon rind and orange peels.
Hassan Ali, a 17-year-old sitting with them, volunteered what might be the occupation's best-case scenario these days.
"The Americans don't have anything to do with us," he said with a shrug, "and we don't have anything to do with them."
