First hand experience of the lawlessness confronting Iraq

We swerved off the highway, fleeing from a car full of gunmen who had chased and shot at us. We drove straight down a dirt bank into the nearest mud-walled farmyard, knowing that whatever awaited us was surely preferable to what we were escaping.

It was nearly dusk and fiercely hot. We were driving toward Basra, the southern city where riots had broken out in the wake of severe fuel and electricity shortages. All along the route, people had peppered us with angry questions and warned of more violence to come, especially against foreigners.

But when we pulled into the unfamiliar yard with one tyre shot out, asking for help, the astonished farm family instantly ushered us into a dark carpeted room and insisted that we remain as their guests until dawn, when they said it would be safe to travel back to Baghdad again.

For the next six hours, my Baghdad-based driver and translator and I were treated to an intimate glimpse of post-war life in a village of Shiite Muslim Marsh Arabs, a poor but proud tribe that was systematically persecuted by the Saddam Hussain regime. The cement house was rudimentary, with an outdoor latrine and several sheep browsing in the refuse-strewn yard, but the walls were painted prettily with floral designs.

Out back, half a dozen women wearing full black abaya cloaks and close-fitting black bonnets tended a large brood of dirty, lively children.

In the front room, a stream of village men popped in and out all evening, the older ones wearing red-checked Arab headdresses and everyone clothed in floor-length dishdasha robes.

Chain-smoking and drinking tiny cups of heavily sugared tea, the clansmen caught up on the day's news - their nightly custom in a close community without telephones or television. With each new arrival, the driver and translator were asked to recount our highway chase in Arabic once more, and sometimes the reaction was explosive.

"Why didn't you chase the thieves and shoot them?" a tribal elder demanded indignantly of our host, laying down a large pistol on the worn carpet. He was deeply offended that the crime had occurred in his territory. "We control this part of the highway, and hijackers cannot be allowed," he said to us apologetically.

Our brush with danger, the villagers said, was part of an alarming breakdown in law and order that began after the war in April and escalated rapidly in recent weeks, as temperatures soared above 120 degrees. Protracted shortages of fuel and electricity drove prices sky-high and left people unable to cook, drive or sleep during long, sweaty nights.

Like other Marsh Arabs and Shiites in southern Iraq, these villagers long opposed Saddam and were frequent targets of official repression. Our host's nephew Ahmed, 24, said his parents and brothers were executed in 1982 after being denounced by members of Saddam's Baath Party. Their ancestral farmlands down the road were confiscated and turned into an army base; the family re-occupied the land just last month.

Yet several men in the parlour - a den of sweltering gloom, relieved by erratic blasts of air-conditioned cold as the electricity sputtered off and on - confessed that they missed the sense of order and security that had prevailed under Saddam's rule.

"Saddam was better than this chaos," said one guest named Jasim. "At least he controlled everything." Everyone complained that fuel and other supplies were being smuggled into Kuwait for more profitable resale, driving local prices through the roof.

The dominant news in the village, though, was another incident that occurred that afternoon: the hijacking of one relative's new pickup truck. Everyone in the room seemed to know who had taken it, and there was brief talk of exacting armed revenge. Then it was decided to offer a ransom price instead, and a family go-between was designated.

At about 10 p.m., however, the negotiator burst angrily into the room, clutching his badly torn dishdasha. In an agitated stream of Arabic, he said the thieves had rejected the offer and so he had ripped his robe in front of them - a tribal display of extreme anger or distress. The other men in the room frowned, rapidly clicking and twirling their prayer beads in obvious consternation.

"We offered them 2.5 million dinars (about $1,600) and still they refused," fumed one village leader named Saleh.

"We are a respectable tribe, we have protected the paper factory here ever since the war so no one would loot it. And now a member of our own tribe steals a truck!" He turned to us and pointed a finger. "You are witnesses to the chaos we are living now," he said.

The gathered clansmen clearly did not approve of the violent protests taking place in Basra and other nearby towns. Still, most said they favoured Ali Sistani, a conservative elderly Shiite Muslim cleric, over Moqtada Sadr, a rabble-rousing younger Shiite leader from southern Iraq who has been goading followers to drive out the coalition troops in southern Iraq.

As the evening discussions continued, platters of food appeared and were consumed, along with more sweet tea, by the shifting circle of visitors sitting on the carpet. At midnight, the final few guests departed, and bedding was laid out for the three of us. After a night of feverish tossing, we were roused at dawn by Ahmed, who had been appointed to accompany us on the road toward Baghdad until we were safely out of southern Iraq.

He turned to look out the window, wiping his eyes on his red-checked headdress, which he had donned to notify potential assailants that, despite our tell-tale licence plate, the passengers were not "foreigners" from the capital. We wondered whether he had hidden a pistol inside his flowing dishdasha, but we did not ask.