At the nearby Zawariyeh hospital, Ahmed Jabbar has just learned where the body of his 22-year-old brother Mohammed, an army conscript, is. A team at the hospital is computerizing all the information about fallen soldiers. "He is at the Rashid hospital. Come with us to collect him," Ahmed asks, unaware of the U.S. ban on the press.

His uncle, Nazal Dkhel, is the head of the extended family and accompanies Ahmed on his grim quest. "Mohammed did not complain about the army service," says Dkhel, who looks grief-stricken and dignified. "He did his compulsory service and there was really nothing anybody could do about that. It was his duty."

Ahmed says that the last time they saw Mohammed, some three weeks before, his brother had not been worried. But when they didn't hear from him even after the war, they came to Baghdad from the nearby town of Faluja to search for him. From the available information they learned that Mohammed was hit by U.S. bombs on one of the last days of the war.

They are not angry with the U.S. "This happened and it is now in the past," says Dkhel. "We now have to live with the new situation."

The family jumps into a waiting taxi carrying an empty coffin and heads to the Rashid hospital.

Apart from the many dead buried in the grounds, some 300 wounded soldiers were also present at the Rashid at the end of the war. Now they have been distributed to other hospitals, notably two in the poor and populous Shia neighborhood Al Thawra, formerly known as Saddam City.

The Jaddariyeh Hospital in Thawra is being guarded not by Americans but by dozens of jumpy young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles, under the direction of a bearded and turban-wearing sayid (Shia sheik). The U.S. troops do not maintain a presence in Thawra, and from the hostile way they asked if I was from the U.S., it seems that Americans are not welcome.

Inside the hospital, the doctors insist that all the wounded soldiers have gone home. "They were wounded more than a week ago," says one. "We treated them and sent them away." The hospital does provide long-term care, though, to civilian patients who have been there for several weeks. The questions about soldiers anger the hospital staff. "Why ask about soldiers?" asks one. "The war made many more civilian casualties. This was an act of American barbarism against the people of Iraq." As we leave, a member of the staff shouts after us: "If you came to spy, why didn't you just wear your American uniform?"

Among the civilian casualties in the hospital was one boy who had just been brought in after having supposedly picked up a cluster bomb: wounds covered his face. Another man was lying in the ward with a serious abdominal wound; he had been at the hospital for 19 days already.

Mistrust and paranoia are ever present, and there is reason to suspect that political groups with an anti-American agenda are helping foment them. Many of the slogans of the regularly returning protesters in the city center -- demanding an end to the U.S. occupation, calling for the restoration of security and services, and decrying "American barbarism" -- as well as many of the expressions used by people who have known connections to Saddam's Baath party, are too similar to be a coincidence.

The Republican Guard sergeant brags that the "old networks" are still functional. He warns that he will go after "traitors" who helped the Americans capture Baghdad, officers who told their men not to fight and who held up supplies and even led the Americans to Iraqi positions.

Wamid Nathmi, a political scientist who used to be regarded as something as close to an opposition figure as one could get in Iraq, has made a 180-degree turn and now subscribes to paranoid theories about how Baghdad could have fallen. At first, he says, he blamed "traitors," but now he hints that Americans used some new and terrible weapon, "maybe a limited-scale nuclear device," against the soldiers defending the International Airport. "Go to the airport," he urges. "The Americans keep it closed to everybody, and I have heard there are hundreds or thousands of dead Iraqi soldiers there who have been burned all over, not shot. That is how they were able to defeat us."

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