City of Fear

No one in Baghdad talks about war. They refer instead to the nightly mortar and rocket fire as "the situation." It's a term used by both Iraqis and foreigners to suggest a more subtle conflict -- a sort-of war. Previously when I was in Baghdad, in April and May, the situation -- car bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, uprisings by Iraqi insurgents -- was probably at its worst level since the end of the formal war. It was also somewhat remote -- with the exception of the occasional car bomb, most of the chaos happened somewhere else.

During the past few weeks, the situation has come to Baghdad. Everyone feels it, though it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what has changed. "You get the eerie feeling that we're on a precipice," says one American official in the International Zone, the four-square-mile, heavily fortified area of the city that's home base to the American diplomatic presence. "It's like, if a couple of crazy people went really nuts here, maybe a whole bunch of them would go nuts."

Baghdad's problem right now is Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric, who used to be described by the coalition as the leader of a "ragtag" band of insurgents. Today, his supporters have turned at least a quarter of Baghdad into a no-go zone. Sadr, who is thirty-one, has the same goal as every other Iraqi resistance leader: He wants the United States out of Iraq. But his greater ambition is for Iraq to become an Islamic republic, like Iran, in which he'll be a key political player. His followers, a legion of thousands of angry, disenfranchised young men, are known as the Jesh al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army -- mahdi means, more or less, "the messiah who will come before the apocalypse."