Deprived of phones and feeling insecure, Iraqis are suspicious, writes Michael Jansen in Baghdad.
Baghdad is a city of 1,001 tales. Deprived of telephones since late March, its citizens spread news of daily goings on by word of mouth.
Most of the reports circulating are bad, making people more and more fearful for their personal security. "A woman driving her car in Karada [the district near my hotel] was shot in the arm by hijackers who took her BMW," I was told by an Arab journalist.
"Men armed with grenades stop buses and threaten to blow them up if passengers don't hand over their money," he added.
A businessman proudly showed me his Iraqi-made Kalashnikov with a wooden stock. "These are difficult to get nowadays. See how they tape two magazines together so they can just switch them around and continue firing."
He has two automatics and a pistol. Everyone has guns in their homes. Everyone is afraid of the robbers, murderers and rapists from al-Thawra district who are terrorising this city of five million. The tales, growing taller with every telling, increase the resentment Iraqis feel towards the occupying powers.
The combination of a lack of security and a severe shortage of petrol means that few Iraqis venture far from home. When they do, they stay within their own quarters of the vast city. Confinement breeds suspicion and hostility towards those from other neighbourhoods. The society is being fractured by mistrust.
A dinner party at the home of Nuha al-Radi, an Iraqi painter, began at 5.30 p.m. and ended at 8 p.m. just as the long hot day began to cool. Few people drive around Baghdad after dark. In any case, she does not have electricity to light her house once the sun goes down.
Nuha lives in Suleiq in a splendid house surrounded by date palms. It was the usual Iraqi party, with everyone talking at once in loud voices, telling the latest tales of robbery and rapine.
Even Saddam Hussein's repressive regime could not silence the voluble Iraqis within their homes. Beer was cooled in freezer drawers filled with chunks of ice, a feast was laid on the table. There was a large mound of pilaf scattered with raisins and tiny meatballs, a chicken and a duck caught from the batch in the garden that morning and grilled by the woman who looks after the house, potato salad and cheese pastries.
Nuha prepared food for 30 but only 20 guests came. No one could call to cancel. The leftovers were distributed to neighbours in need. Food spoils quickly in Baghdad's summer heat.
On street corners, young men rent satellite phone time to passers-by. Iraqis have no other way to ring relatives abroad to say they are OK or to ask for money. Last week the price of a minute was $4 (a clerk's monthly salary).
Iraq's new rulers may not repair land lines but instead set up a mobile network. Meanwhile the exchanges which have served the city for decades are being burnt one by one by arsonists. Satellite phones are fashionable among the affluent.
My driver, Issa, a Christian from a northern quarter, was terrified when I told him I wanted to go to al-Thawra, the city of two million poor Shias within the capital.
Saddam used to warn Iraqis living elsewhere to behave or he would let loose on them the denizens of al-Thawra. I wanted to see how a joint US-Shia clean-up campaign was proceeding.
"No one in my family ever went to al-Thawra," Issa remarked in a tremulous voice. Al-Thawra, meaning "revolution", was established in the 1960s, renamed Saddam City by the fallen regime and recently dubbed Sadr City, for a slain Shia cleric.
I told Issa, an unemployed goldsmith who had not worked for three months, that I wanted to go to the Hikmat mosque where the firebrand Sheikh Muhammad al-Fardosi preaches.
When Issa asked directions of a man on a street corner, he offered to show us the way. It never occurred to Issa that the man could be a car-jacker. Fortunately he was just an honest man looking for a ride home.
Al-Thawra is a sprawling city of dun-coloured one-storey houses built on a vast tract of dun-coloured desert. Roads are potholed, covered in sand or sunk beneath deep pools of filthy water leaking from broken water mains. Dark rivulets of raw sewage run between the buildings; plastic bags, paper and rubbish litter the landscape.
The clean-up campaign is supposed to be a joint US-Iraqi effort, an attempt to build trust through co-operation.
Here and there earnest teams of Iraqi men armed with shovels instead of guns attempted to turn back the tide of garbage.
There was no sign of the US soldiers or the lorries they were supposed to bring to cart away the mounds of gleanings being picked over by clutches of goats.
The gate of the Hikmat mosque was locked, the sheikh and his guards had not yet come. In al- Thawra, as elsewhere in Baghdad, even the doors of the house of God are locked against thieves.