The two looters peered nervously through a hole in the fence of a large house on the outskirts of Basra.
"Come on," said the one, a young man called Nassar, who said he was unemployed, "Let's go inside there's nothing wrong with just looking." His colleague, Abdul, caked in mud that made him look older than his 18 years, shook his head.
"Nassar, if you knew whose house that is, you wouldn't be so keen," he said, "That house belongs to Chemical Ali."
Although reported as killed earlier in an allied bombing raid, the name of the man who used chemical weapons to kill 80,000 Kurds was enough to make Nassar pause with a leg on either side of the fence. But as another day of looting came to end in Basra the hesitation was only brief.
"He must have gone already," said Nassar, "Or he would have already shot us for standing here."
The two thieves crossed the lawn of the house, with its Greek pillared façade overlooking Basra's river front. They had reached a small putting green before a voice shouted at them: "Stop at once. Do you know who this property belongs to?" A portly figure dressed in dirty black robes appeared from behind a pillar.
"Chemical Ali?" said Abdul hopelessly. "No it's mine," said Rashia Kharairula Ali, the matriarch of a family of 21, who up until a few hours ago had been homeless but were now the proud owners of Ali's riverside pad. "Now stop sneaking around and go away."
As the two looters lingered, however, she agreed reluctantly to show them around her new property. The legacy of fear left by Chemical Ali, the name by which even Basra's poor call him, it seemed needed dispelling.
"Only don't touch anything," Rashia added sternly, although it soon became clear little but Chemical Ali's name, inscribed in Koranic script over the doorway had been left of the man's property by less cautious looters.
The spacious rooms were without furniture and the walls had been stripped bare of fittings and ornaments. Only in the bathrooms did some sense the former owner remain.
Voluptuous baths, too heavy to lift stood as an eerie testimony to a mass murderer in repose. In the principal bedroom, the marble bath was blood red in colour and streaked with gold.
"We have taken back what has been stolen from us," said Rashia.
She explained how she and her large family had become destitute after her husband's death during the Iran-Iraq war, when two of her sons were also killed.
Her children and grandchildren had lived on the streets, working as day labourers during the winter months and begging in summer.
A British soldier, standing on watch near by, said: "Looting is wrong but there is a part of me which agrees with these poor people, who are finally venting their anger against an unjust and terrible regime."