Truth is a deal breaker in Baath-landia. Facts are chased away like urchins. Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi information minister, could stand on an American tank and simultaneously deny its presence in Baghdad. He could say that it was an Iraqi tank, merely lent to Ukrainians dressed as Americans. "Now you see," he would say, "they are not in the city. We are making an action film." I cheered him on during his press conferences because they were so absurd. How long could he hold out and maintain that Baghdad had not fallen? Sahaf's endurance was extraordinary and that should be a warning to the occupiers. There are some Iraqis who are so used to being exposed to the ideological radiation of the regime that they expect a replacement. What has happened to their minds? The coalition might be able to restore electricity and water but it has no answer for this problem. Winning the war was the easy part.

We left the hospital in search of a meal; we heard the mullah's call to prayer. I said we should drive to the Bab al Tob and see if we could find a place downtown where people congregated to eat. Rashad thought this was maybe a bad idea but nodded anyway and drove where I wanted him to go. When we reached the intersection that held the governorate, we saw that the downtown zone had died. No one walking. No traffic. An eerie vacuum that is invariably followed by automatic weapons fire. A full week after its liberation, the city felt less friendly than it had before, deliberated, turning against the Americans. Post-demonstration, post-Amina Mosul, the center was now a free-fire zone. Iraqi flags were flying everywhere. There was another story about the flag. The flag couldn't be touched, one man said, because it had the words "allahu akhbar" on it and lowering it was forbidden. The flag stayed up. Then more went up, until the center was blooming with Iraqi government flags.

The Americans were also missing from the picture. We turned left toward the Tigris and there was a burst of shooting and for the first time in a long time I panicked and gave Rashad bad directions. Rashad stopped the car and I demanded instead that he keep going, which was a mistake. It is always better to wait and get a good read on the situation before driving into a place, and I know this, but I was not thinking clearly. The other streets were one way in the wrong direction. To the right was a much worse choice. We figured it out and there was more automatic weapons fire from the center, men in cars driving by. The U.S. had retreated, possibly to the airport.

Rashad took us to the Kurdish quarter where a kebab place was jumping with customers, most of them armed. I caught Rashad looking at a Kurdish man dressed in black at the table across from us. The man he was watching looked around him like he was expecting trouble. Baravan looked over at the man in black and then told him to please move his rifle so that the barrel didn't point straight at him. I asked Rashad if the man was a peshmerga. Rashad didn't know and didn't think so. It would have been strange if it had been true because the Americans had ordered all the peshmerga out of the city. The question remained about this man's identity and why he was carrying a kalashnikov if he wasn't a soldier. Outside the restaurant, we asked him, "Who is your commander?" The man replied: "I have no commander." Which settled it -- he was a rogue gunman and could have been involved in any of the mayhem that plagued Mosul since its fall. Arabs claimed that they had been harassed by Kurdish gunmen dressed like peshmergas.

We drove away from the center and on the way stopped at a mosque that had piles of looted goods in front of it. We knew that mosques all over Mosul had loot piles inside their walls. The mullahs were busy collecting stolen items from the men who had looted them. The mullahs told the looters that God would forgive them if they returned the goods, and over the course of a week the piles grew. We stopped the car at the Sabrin mosque, which is a humble place with a nice assortment of heavy equipment and computer parts, thinking we could at least add a positive development to the list of events we had witnessed or heard about in the city. This mosque had office supplies and generators, building material in yellow fiber sacks. Someone had taken great care to catalog and mark each item with the name of the man who returned it and where it had come from. A sign over the gate read "Committee of al Wadha," the group of guys. The community was getting itself together.

I walked through the gates and so did my colleague; she was careful to put a scarf over her hair. As soon as we arrived, one of the older men offered me a chair and just then a procession of men carried a body on a bier into the courtyard. We stood until the body was out of sight. The men were kind, they were chatting with us, and there was nothing wrong. A man named Saleh Khalaf told me: "The peshmerga and the Americans make a civil war between Kurdish and Arabs in Mosul, but good men have control of the situation now and everything will be OK." Mr. Khalaf had faith that Kurds and Arabs could work out their differences. Other men said the same things, that the Kurds and Arabs could live in peace. They went on to talk about their system for returning the stolen things. I said the system seemed to be working. Everything was fine. Baravan translated away. The men showed me the ledgers where all the information was recorded and they were proud. They should have been; it was a big job and they had it figured out. All goods went back to their rightful owner through a trusted intermediary. No one was punished or condemned.

The crowd got larger as word got out that there were foreigners at the mosque. Soon we started getting different kinds of questions. Angry men pushed their way in from the back rows to get their statements in. A very angry man with a beard and a shaved upper lip hijacked the conversation. "Muslims are not terrorists!" he shouted. "The responsibility for this is with the American forces because they push the peshmerga into Mosul. They brought us Saddam Hussein and they destroyed everything in all Muslim countries. We will start to arm ourselves against the thieves. We won't forget what happened with the American forces and we will try to do what is necessary to the American forces." This man who was angry gave his name as Brigadier Engineer Taha Yassin. It also happens to be the name of one of the Iraqi vice presidents, a man close to Saddam. Baravan drifted to the edge of the crowd, which was still growing. Some of the angry men spoke English.

One man was a university professor in a red sweater who spoke eloquently, but I lost him in the crush of people. They asked who I was, and I told them. It did not go over well. One man accused me of being a spy and wanted to know why I was traveling with a Dutch woman. The same man yelled and demanded to know why the peshmerga were arresting Baath Party members. I told him it was the first I was hearing about it. Another man blamed the war on the Iranians, Kuwaitis and the Jews, and then I knew who the angry men were. They were Baathists who lost out and had come together at the mosque. The Sabrin mosque was their meeting point. It also happened to be the meeting point of good men who wanted to do the right thing. It was the problem of competing forces.

Someone was stirring up a problem behind us. One man reached over and slapped at my colleague's arm and she looked at him and kept writing. A man shouted: "The Americans must go out!" We stayed until Baravan came up to me. "We should leave now," he said, and he didn't look good. I accepted that because it had become impossible to work. We were walking through the gates when another man wanted to know what I was doing. I told him that I had just spoken to the other Muslim men. He was not satisfied. "Do you need anything here?" he yelled. The crowd followed. We were not walking quickly enough for Baravan who had made it to the car. Rashad had the car running. My colleague Minka from Holland got in the car and we drove out of town. Baravan said later: "Do you know why I brought you out of there?" I told him I thought it was just generally unpleasant. "No," Baravan said, "that's not why. I heard someone say 'Kahtilohom.'" I wanted to know what that meant. "It means 'Kill them.'"

[For a directory of Phillip Robertson's past stories from Iraq, click here.]

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