Baghdad is broken.

Broken is the national power grid, which provides no more than four hours of electricity to the city's homes. Broken are the sewage pipes, which leak untreated waste into streets and squares.

Broken is the water supply network, which leaves entire neighborhoods without running water for days on end. Garbage is everywhere, because the citywide system of trash pickup is broken, too.

All of these services stopped working properly when the war began, so, on the surface, Baghdad looks a lot similar to the way it looked in 2006, during my previous trip here, except the garbage heaps now are more widespread and the pools of sewage are wider and deeper.

But something that is much harder to repair than basic infrastructure is broken now, too.

Mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods: vanished. Friendly public discussions about politics: no way, too dangerous. The neighborly trust that once allowed Sunnis and Shias share the same street is gone, flushed away in the wake of the vicious sectarian fighting that engulfed the city last year. Fear of reprisals is real: although there is little violence associated with Sunni insurgents in Baghdad, Shiite militias terrorize the population through extortion, kidnappings and extrajudicial killings.

"That sectarian cleansing is almost done with, but there is still a taste," said Army Captain Sean Chase, a company commander in the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division. Chase's Bravo company is stationed in Risala, a once-mixed southwestern Baghdad neighborhood that is now pretty much entirely Shia. "Sunnis don't really trust Shiites," he sums up, "Shiites don't really trust Sunnis."

American civil affairs officers trying to figure out how to fix this broken city say rebuilding the infrastructure is key. Bring street lights to a neighborhood's main drag, they say, and next thing you know, the sense of security is back, shops stay open later, people are chatting over flavored hookahs in coffee shops, and reconciliation is underway. But so far, the only things that have visibly improved in Iraq seem to be located inside military installations.

Camp Striker, the layover point for troops, diplomats, defense contractors and embedded journalists coming in and going from Iraq, has grown from a field of dusty tents and plastic porta-potties three years ago to a veritable city within a city. Now it has two chapels (one is under construction), air-conditioned living containers, real showers and flush-down toilets, Subway, Burger King, Pizza Hut and a 24-hour coffee shop that makes excellent lattes. New souvenir shops are peddling new souvenirs: the mugs inscribed with the words "Who's your Baghdaddy?" (that's so 2005!) are gone. The new popular mug reads, instead: "If you ain't Sunni, you ain't Shiite."

I am waiting for a military flight to take me from Baghdad, where I spent the last two and a half weeks, to Amman, Jordan, from where I will go home. Outside the air-conditioned outbound passenger terminal, which in 2006 was a simple hangar and now occupies a vast pavilion with a comfortable sitting area, a VIP lounge, and a metal detector, I strike up a conversation with Eddie Bello, an Iraqi-born American who works in Iraq as a cultural advisor to US troops in Iraq. Bello, who left Iraq in 1976 and who has been working here for almost three years, offers a somber projection on how long it will take to heal the deep wounds caused by the sectarian violence.

"Maybe by the end of the century they'll fix it," he says.

"They may talk about reconciliation, but revenge is here, in their hearts," Bello says, placing a hand on his chest. "In Iraq, the tribes say that if someone killed one of their members, they can (exact) revenge on that person's tribe for forty years."

BAGHDAD—I met Army Captain Andrew Shulman last fall, when he was on leave in the States. At the time, he was the only Jewish chaplain deployed to Iraq, and we joked about the quirks of keeping kosher in Iraq, observing the Shabbat in a deployment where "every day is a Monday," and the excesses of life on sprawling military bases that serve Baskin-Robbins ice cream every day (some flavors are kosher) and Maine lobster on Fridays (decidedly not kosher, but still a great conversation topic). The war for him largely seemed to be a great adventure of a Jew from Beverly Hills to a Biblical land that, until recently, had wiping Israel off the map as one of its officially stated goals. The death and destruction that raged outside his military base appeared to have little effect on him.

I am passing through the base where Shulman is stationed, Camp Striker, one of the several heavily guarded military installations that ring Baghdad International Airport, where roads have names and road signs (I notice "Red Sock Rd.," named, I guess, for an unnamed Red Sox player), souvenir shops peddle gold jewelry and bootleg DVDs, the dining facility serves made-to-order stir fry, among other things, and most soldiers have never had to put on their flak jackets. I shoot him an email, wondering if he's in town.

Lo and behold, Shulman is here. We agree to meet by the chapel—the one with the "illegal cross" on the baptistery out front, Shulman remarks, wryly. Military chapels are supposed to be non-denominational; the chapel with the cross is where Shulman holds Shabbat services for a handful of Jews deployed here.

We walk together to get lunch at the dining facility; Shulman gets fresh vegetables, pickles (kosher), mayo (kosher), and mustard (ditto). He is tanner than I remember him, and clean shaven. But something else has changed.

If I were to interview him about his deployment today, Shulman tells me, our conversation wouldn't be as light-hearted as last fall.

On Passover, he explains, two Jewish majors were killed. The families wanted some form of rabbinic oversight over the way the bodies were handled, and Shulman went to the morgue.

"Blood on the floor," he recalls. "Lots of dust. They try to make it nice, but you know, it's Iraq."

The trip to the morgue had a sobering effect on Shulman's thoughts about the war in Iraq.

"If everyone saw that," Shulman says, "I think [we’d] all be out of here in a second."

BAGHDAD—Thaab's friends are getting ready to play a game of soccer in a dusty field down the street, but Thaab, a skinny 17-year-old boy, will not be joining them.

His right leg is in a cast and a metal rod is sticking out of his right elbow, held together by a stainless steel contraption that resembles a crane. He has been confined to a wheelchair for seven months, since a car bomb detonated several yards behind him when he was walking to a friend's party. Thaab lost a piece of his right arm, including a chunk of bone. His friends try to cheer him up by drawing pictures on his cast with their pens: a grinning skeleton, a girl reading a book.

"There's more surgery I need to do," Thaab says. "I missed school this year because of this."

All around the Baghdad Iraqis bear scars of war. Everyone knows someone who was killed or wounded. Hundreds of families have had their loved ones kidnapped, never to be seen again. Many, like Thaab, were hurt in bombings and shootings. Craters from car bombs deface many roads, and holes where shrapnel or bullets hit pockmark the walls on every street.

Crooks are using the widespread fear of sectarian militias to get their way. Hoda al-Naim spends days sitting with a book on pillows on the tiled floor of her kitchen, her left leg in a cast. A doctor hit her with his car, and, before he left the scene of the accident, gave al-Naim his business card and promised to treat her.

But when al-Naim's daughter called to make an appointment, the doctor told her not to call again, or else he would send fighters from the feared Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to the woman's house.

Most likely, the doctor has no ties to the Mahdi Army whatsoever. But al-Naim is not taking chances. She went to a doctor in her neighborhood and paid $1,000 for surgery and the cast herself.

At the gravel-strewn combat outpost in Baghdad's Risala neighborhood, U.S. Army Captain Sean Chase, who is serving in the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, contemplates the losses Iraqis have suffered during the war. This is his third deployment to Iraq since the war began, and he says the place has deteriorated since he first came here in 2003.

"If you think about how we live here, we live pretty well," he says, swatting away flies. "We have plenty of food, and we get plenty of sleep for soldiers. After this deployment we will go home. It's the people in the streets who have been living with this for the last five years, who have to keep living with it."

BAGHDAD—It is a familiar scene: Holding their M4 rifles at the ready, American soldiers push through the metal gate, swing open the front door and stomp into the house, stepping on shoes someone has left by the doorway and tracking dried mud onto the living room carpet, on which the family sits for dinner. They run into room after room, overturning chairs, tossing clothes out of closets as they search for weapons. The terrified family tries to huddle in the corner as the soldiers separate men from women and children.

I follow them. I trip over someone's slipper in my dirty shoes. I track dirt onto the living room carpet. I look at the family's possessions being spilled out onto the floor, old black-and-white wedding pictures lying on top of dirty sweatpants. I hear the women say something in Arabic to the American soldiers before the Army translator has even entered the house. I don't understand a word.

I say "Salaam aleikum" to the family, or simply nod, depending on the ferocity of the search. It's possible that these men have pissed off their neighbor, who told the Americans that they were the bad guys. Or they could be militants plotting to kill someone, maybe me. The women might be would-be suicide bombers. They may be directly responsible for the horrible deaths of other American soldiers from this unit, young men who left behind widows who are too young to be widows and whose children are too young to remember their fathers apart from the stories adults tell them. Anything is possible. I take detailed notes so that later I can write a story about it.

This time, Americans found nothing incriminating in the house, and everyone's papers are in order. I take off my Kevlar helmet. The platoon leader is talking to the men politely, asking, through a translator, whether they have noticed any suspicious activity in the neighborhood. The men lie—at least in part—that they are happy that Americans patrol their streets. A child comes out, offering us some stale bread. Using the handful of Arabic words in my arsenal and a lot of body language, I ask for a glass of cold water. I introduce myself to the women and children. They say something back, but, again, I don't understand a word. Maybe they're telling me they are pleased to meet me. Maybe they are telling me to clean up before I leave.

Everybody shakes hands. I say "Ma' salaama," goodbye, and follow the soldiers. We are going to track some mud through another house. Maybe we'll catch one of the bad guys, so that the streets of Baghdad become safer. Or maybe we'll get some more bread, and I'll get another glass of water.

BAGHDAD—The humvee swiveled around the concrete barriers, drove past an Iraqi Army checkpoint, and left Saidiyah.

At first the world outside the neighborhood did not look much different than Saidiyah, a section of Baghdad that US troops had surrounded by a 12-foot-high fence to keep militias out and entice former residents, who had fled sectarian fighting there last year, back in.

Just like in Saidiyah, everything lay covered in dust. Like in Saidiyah, drivers pulled over and stared straight ahead warily as the American convoy drove by. Like in Saidiyah, ripped black, pink, blue and white plastic bags flew from concertino wire that stretched along many cement fences.

But a minute later, this part of southwestern Baghdad did not look like Saidiyah at all.

Vast fields of trash—every kind of trash, food, empty paint cans, remnants of broken cars, a blue-and-white bus without a cabin or wheels—stretched out to our left and right. Much of the trash was decomposed, compressed and covered a layer of dust so thick it was impossible to discern what it was. On top of the trash, in dwellings made of mud and empty oil canisters, people lived: barefoot children, women who stared through glassless windows at the humvees, old men who sat in the dirt, smoking cigarettes. A boy ran out of a hut with a roof made of sheets of plywood and tarpaulin that was held on top of the walls by tires and rocks. "Mister!" he yelled, running alongside the truck and waving. "I love you!" Dirty dogs lay, panting, in the refuse.

Some of the people have always been living in the wasteland, and others have moved there to escape sectarian violence. But the trash is new. After the war began the area became a virtual landfill.

In the middle of the wasteland, the convoy came to a stop. The soldiers wanted to check out one of the houses, and we got out of the humvees, cautiously finding our way amid piles of garbage.

Soon, a group of men and a little barefoot boy hurried in our direction. As they were walking, a dog with matted fur the color of dirt ran toward them and pounced on the boy. The boy fell and began to cry. The men kicked the dog and laughed. The boy's elbows were bleeding.

"Is this somebody's dog, because otherwise I'll shoot it?" yelled one of the soldiers. The military interpreter translated for the men and one of them replied:

"It's my dog, but go ahead, shoot it. It doesn't like my wife, either."

Several soldiers followed the dog behind the house, where trash lay in heaps. Two shots rang out. Then we got back into the humvees and drove off, leaving the dead dog behind – presumably, to rot amid the trash.

"It was a public health concern," 2nd Lieutenant Chris Allen explained later.

The American convoy drove out of the fields and into a side street. It was a little cleaner. Most of the storefronts were shuttered, and there were few people in the street. A sign that read, in Arabic, "I live for the Mahdi Army" – the Shiite militia of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – was spray-painted on a wall. Black Shiite flags flew from many houses. People stared at the convoy. Nobody waved.

"They hate us down there," Allen explained. The Americans suspect that Shiite militias use the area to traffic weapons.

The Americans made a U-turn near a field where teenagers were playing soccer in the dirt, and drove back to Saidiyah. Inside the walls, on the neighborhood's main street throngs of shoppers, sucking on fruit smoothies and eating ice cream, strolled down a dusty pavement. Not all the shops were open, and far from all of Saidiyah's residents who had fled sectarian violence have returned to the neighborhood. Piles of garbage lay here and there, concrete fences stood pockmarked with shrapnel, electricity was down in most of the neighborhood, and the concrete guts of a house damaged by a car bomb spilled onto the sidewalk.

Even compared to my trip here in 2006, Saidiyah is a mess. But compared to the Baghdad that lies outside its walls, it is good. It is safe. It is prosperous.

And that is depressing.

BAGHDAD—It's 10 p.m., and much of Baghdad's neighborhood of Saidiyah has fallen into darkness. The city power is off, as it tends to be most of the time, and there are no street lights. Some houses are lit up, powered by neighborhood generators; others are either empty, their owners in self-imposed exile, or dark because it is expensive to keep the lights on. Baghdadis once were famous for long dinners that lasted until midnight, but now it is cheaper to go to bed early.

Moving stealthily along crepuscular streets, American soldiers use night-vision goggles to pick out the houses they are going to search tonight. Before they left the base, US Army Lieutenant Rusty Mason instructed his soldiers how to decide whether to search a house:

"If there's an abandoned building, no footprints, it's not an ideal candidate for checking out," he said. "But if it's an abandoned building and there's some footprints, like someone's been going in and out of it, then go and check it out."

The soldiers knock on metal gates, and the rattle and the whirr of generators are the only sounds.

In one house, the soldiers have roused a family. In another, a teenage girl fearfully hides behind her mother.

"Are you shy?" one soldier asks, in English, trying to alleviate the discomfort. The soldiers, in their bulky body armor and with their M4 rifles, crowd the tiled yard illuminated by the soft light seeping through the windows of the house.

"She is afraid," says the girl's mother, a school principal.

"Why?" the soldier asks.

Another soldier responds, sarcastically: "Why should I be afraid of everybody with their weapons coming to my house?"

At another house, two brothers in their mid-20s are working on a car. They send their younger brother to fetch some bread for the Americans. Iraqis are famous for their hospitality.

In a shadowy yard a block away, Dr. A.H. Kadhim, professor of philosophy at Baghdad University, and his son, Anis, who is studying to become a dentist, patiently answer the Americans' questions about their life in Saidiyah. It is safer now, they say, in slow but eloquent English. No fighting in the streets. In the kitchen, the remnants of their dinner—home-made pizza—are on the stove, and on the kitchen table sits a sewing machine with a bunched-up piece of pale green silky cloth.

At one point, the father mentions that the Americans' Bradley fighting vehicle had ripped the wire the family used to get power from a community generator. Now the family has to use their own generator instead, which pumps noxious diesel fumes into the yard. The conversation has to be shouted, because the family's generator is loud.

"I'm sorry," says Second Lieutenant Henry Mitchell. I wonder out loud if the Iraqis should be compensated—Americans often pay Iraqis for the property damage they cause.

"It's okay, it's okay," Anis waves his hands. Then, to my amazement, he asks the big American soldiers with body armor and guns: "Is there anything we can do for you?"

BAGHDAD—Sergeant Herbert Smitley calls himself a country boy from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania.

He also says that he's "25, but I feel like I'm 50," because of all he'd seen as a soldier.

When terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Sergeant Smitley was serving in the Old Guard, which serves as a presidential escort and conducts ceremonial burials at Arlington Cemetery. He was dispatched to the Pentagon on a search-and-rescue mission for 15 days.

"That was horrible," he recalls. "We were pulling out bodies. You see this old Army guy, he was working at the Pentagon, probably waiting the last couple of years before his retirement, and then…" Sgt. Smitley takes a respectful pause, drags on a cigarette. "You'd find his desk, with pictures of his wife and kids. It was really tough."

In 2003, Smitley, a trained infantryman, asked to be deployed to Iraq. He volunteered three times and was denied.

"They said: 'No, we need you here,'" he said. They needed him at Arlington Cemetery to help bury the troops killed during the invasion. "It was tough because I'm an infantryman, and I was burying fellow infantry men who were killed over here during the initial push." Another drag on a cigarette. "I thought I could do more over here."

Finally, in 2005, he was deployed to Baghdad.

"My wife wasn't happy [about] it but she understood that I wanted to be here," said Smitley, who has a three-year-old son. "She knew I was going to deploy."

This is his second deployment. He arrived here in November, with the Apache Company of the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division. He spent the first few months of his deployment in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad's southwest. There, on March 23, four of his buddies were killed by a rocket that pierced their Bradley fighting vehicle: Staff Sergeant Christopher Hake, Specialist Jose Rubio, Private First Class Andrew Habsieger and Private George Delgado. They were burned alive, pressed against the back hatch, which wouldn't open because it had melted to the body of the track during the explosion.

Another one of the Apache Company's men was killed in January: Private James Goodrich. A rocket, designed by anti-American militias to pierce through the thick armor of Bradleys and tanks, hit his Bradley and sliced his body in half. After his death, the company adopted a pale-yellow mutt and named her in Goodrich's name, Goodie. They built her a doghouse out of plywood, perhaps the most elaborately built structure in the dusty combat outpost where they live, and fitted it with a mattress. Goodie likes to catch frogs, fetch, and bark at the front gate of the compound. The soldiers say it's because she doesn't like Iraqis.

Some Apache soldiers like to talk about the men they had lost, get it all out. First Sergeant James Braet imitated for me the poses in which the four men who were burned to death were found. He also showed me pictures of the soldier who lost sight in both of his eyes when a piece of shrapnel pierced his forehead, cutting his retinal nerves. The pictures show a face of a young man covered in blood and breathing through an oxygen mask.

Sergeant Smitley doesn't talk about his company's losses. He confesses that he doesn't really like reporters. Not because they have misrepresented his words, but because he considers them a liability in battle.

"I don't want my guys to have to think about a reporter when they need to be thinking about the situation on the ground," he explains. "Just wouldn't want to have someone who is not a triggerman."

He has seven or eight months left in Iraq before he can go home. He doesn't want to come back here.

"I think I'll take a break after this one," he says about his deployment. "Maybe train soldiers or something."

BAGHDAD—At the meeting of the Saidiyah neighborhood council, created to foster reconciliation in the area devastated by months of sectarian bloodshed, council member Hussein al-Qaesi blurted out:

"The people arrested in the killing of my brother and the shooting of Abu Marwan [another council member]. I want the Iraqi and American security forces to reveal their real names and tribes. That way we can do a traditional settlement with their tribes."

For the uninitiated—American officers who attended the meeting—al-Qaesi clarified:

"A traditional settlement is usually the life of the son or the brother," he said. "We understand that there will be a trial, too, but we need to solve this. This is a tribal community and we have to work on a tribal basis, too."

Abu Marwan, whose formal name is Walid Khaled al-Bari, was shot in the face, stomach and right foot, and al-Qaesi's brother was killed last week by two assailants in al-Bari's real estate office. American troops arrested the assailants and three other people in a house in Saidiyah, where they also found vests fitted with explosives, the kind that suicide bombers use, and some ordnance.

Now the victims' friends and relatives wanted revenge. An eye for an eye in the land of Hammurabi.

This was not the first time al-Qaesi and other members of the council have brought up tribal justice. In a private meeting earlier this week, they asked Captain Andrew Betson, whose Alpha Company of the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division operates in Saidiyah, to extradite the prisoners, or at least let the council members "interrogate them" for 24 hours. Betson, who has transferred the detainees to U.S. military intelligence, said at the time that he could do neither.

Betson is taking the threat of tribal justice seriously. He said he will protect the tribal identity of the detainees from the council members, although if the names did become public, he said, "I hope their tribes just do a lot of talk and eat lamb together and it's forgotten."

"I don't know," I said. "He's talking about killing sons and brothers."

How do retaliatory killings figure into the concept of reconciliation, I asked Lieutenant Colonel Johnnie Johnson, the 4-64 commander, after the meeting was over. If every family whose member was killed during sectarian bloodshed that peaked in Iraq last year kills a family member from the killer's tribe, peace will never come.

"We don't condone that kind of stuff," said Johnson. "We're trying to work against it."

But at the same time, he acknowledged that there is little American troops can do to put an end to tribal justice.

"They've been doing it that way for how many years? Thousands?" he said after the meeting was over. "I'm not sure we can change them, or that it's our job to change them. The rule of law is what we strive to facilitate: the court system, the justice system. Someone tries to get revenge like that and gets caught—the rule of law applies to them."

BAGHDAD—There was word that American forces would release four detainees at 11 a.m. at the neighborhood council, and the woman in a black abaya thought it was a good time to ask about her husband. Her husband, an Iraqi Army commissioner, went north to Tikrit one day a year ago, and was detained by American troops on the way there.

When the U.S. forces finally arrived, after 2 p.m., the woman in a black abaya was waiting quietly in the garden, watching her sons, a preteen boy and a toddler, play in the withered, dusty lawn. She waited while the troops smoked cigarettes with the council chairman. She waited while the detainees relatives came in and signed documents pledging that the detainees would not join anti-American militias. She waited some more while the detainees came in, tearfully embraced their loved ones and denounced violence.

When they finally left, the woman approached the American captain, Andrew Betson. In her hands she held two photographs of her husband, and two paper stubs American troops had given her, attesting that her husband had been detained.

"Can you tell me, please, where my husband is," the woman said quietly. "Which detention center is holding him?"

She gave Captain Betson her husband's full name: Mohammed Hussein Alwan Jasem al-Ubaidi.

"I don't know why he has been detained. I need to know which detention facility is holding him," she said.

"Many of them are just guilty by association," muttered First Sergeant Jim Braet. It is his second deployment to Baghdad since 2003, and he's seen how detentions can go.

The captain looked carefully at the picture she brought, depicting a middle-aged Iraqi man with a mustache. He looked at the paper stubs American forces gave her, indicating that her husband had been detained. He took down his name, and said he would try to find out. He made no promises.

"Do you want his picture?" the woman asked. "I've been looking for him for one year. God, please look for him!"

"I will try to find out," the captain replied.

How would he find out? He does not even know how many residents of Saidiyah, the Baghdad neighborhood where he commands a U.S. Army company, have been detained over the years, or how many are still in detention.

"You're talking years, and different units," he said.

The woman walks away, holding her children's hands, and I wondered how many of such women there are in Iraq, their husbands taken by American forces and disappeared in the vast coalition detention system.

Anna Badkhen, 32, has covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and Kashmir. She recently returned to Iraq—her 10th trip since 2003—and will report a series of journals for The Muckraker on Baghdad's attempt at reconciliation after the sectarian bloodshed of 2007, what American troops are doing, and how Iraqis live five years after President Bush delivered a victorious speech under the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

BAGHDAD—The Black Hawk hovered low over the rapid Tigris River, turning this way and that as it followed the river's gentle curve. The war-ravaged city unfolded below us.

A year after a wave of sectarian massacres swept through Baghdad, much of the city remains a ghost town. In a scene reminiscent of the movie I Am Legend, a shepherd rushed his flock through streets once packed with cars bumper to bumper. I recognized the neighborhood: Karrada, where five years ago I shopped for food and souvenirs to bring home. Back then, the driver of my taxi had to double-park his car to let me off.

The city was full of hope then, and I would visit Iraqi friends for dinners that stretched into early morning hours. We would sit in their fragrant gardens and talk about the new Iraq without Saddam. There were occasional suicide bombings, roadside bombs targeting American troops, and unrest in Ramadi and Falluja, to the west of Baghdad, all harbingers of a widespread insurgency that was soon to engulf the country, but it was still safe for Western reporters to stroll, unaccompanied and undisguised, out of their hotels and grab some late-night chicken tikka and baba ghanoush in Baghdad's many bustling joints. At the time, it seemed to me that if the United States tried to better understand the roots of Sunni insurgency, quickly rebuilt the infrastructure and helped Iraqi security forces return to work, American troops could prevent the violence from spreading.

I returned to Baghdad two years ago, a few months after the bombing of the Shiite Askariyah Mosque in Samarrah set off a deluge of sectarian killings. Iraqis were killing each other for being Sunni, Shiite, government employees, government critics, secular intellectuals and religious scholars, and simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mangled bodies of tortured teachers and shop owners turned up in the streets. Thousands of families were fleeing the city; thousands others were streaming in, to escape sectarian reprisals in farmlands that surround it. People huddled in abandoned hospitals, factories, others’ deserted homes; and built makeshift houses and lean-tos in the wasteland on Baghdad's outskirts. They had little electricity, little running water, little food, and little hope.

Sectarian warfare has died down, and even as American troops battle with the Mahdi Army of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the slums of Sadr City, violence is on the decline. Areas of the crippled city are returning to life, like the upscale southwestern neighborhood of Saidiyah, home to about 15,000 families and the site of some of the more violent fighting between Sunni and Shiite militias. More than half of Saidiyah's stood abandoned as recently as January this year, and now, the majority of the owners have returned. More than 800 shops have reopened here since February, a restaurant flung open its doors, and thigh-high concrete barriers that barricaded the streets are gone. A council of local representatives is made up of Sunnis and Shiites.

"A lot has changed for the positive," said Lt. Col. Johnnie Johnson, commander of the 4th battalion, 64th armor regiment of the Fourth Bridage, Third Infantry Division, which operates in Saidiyah under the command of the Fourth Infantry Division's First Brigade. "We take a bit of pride in Saidiyah. There are signs of light all over the place."

Compared to the devastation I saw on the pages of newspapers and on TV in 2007, I do see signs of light. There are no corpses left to decompose in the streets. Some stores are open, and women and children walk down the street in the afternoon eating ice cream. But I saw the same picture during my last visit, in 2006, when I last saw Iraqi women and children navigate garbage-strewn streets with ice cream cones in their hands. There are just more bullet holes in the walls, more windows shattered by explosions.

To achieve the shaky peace in Saidiyah, the U.S. military has surrounded it with a 12-foot concrete wall to keep the bad guys out. Even so, Johnson pointed out, "crime still occurs." Last week, his battalion's Alpha Company and Iraqi forces in Saidiyah discovered a weapons cache that included 30 rocket-propelled grenades, 22 120-mm mortars and 200 pounds of C4 explosive.

When Fourth Infantry Division's officers showed me pictures of the cache, I thought I was experiencing deja vu. Last time I was in Baghdad, the 10th Mountain Division unit I was embedded with, too, found large caches of weapons in an upscale neighborhood. The pictures on the Fourth Infantry Division's slides looked just like the photos the San Francisco Chronicle photographer Michael Macor took during that raid.

In a wasteland just south of Saidiyah, poor Iraqis displaced from their homes still live in makeshift dwellings patched together with bricks made of mud, rusty oil canisters and bits of plastic still sit on the outskirts of town—except now the shacks are surrounded by impromptu landfills, where garbage is ankle-deep. Snowy white egrets still circle over putrid pools of stagnant water, which ranges in color from marsh brown to fluorescent green, depending on the algae that grows in it. Stray dogs pant in puddles of sewage.

Compared to 2007, life in Saidiyah has certainly improved. But compared to 2006, it has not, and in the larger scheme of things, it seems that American forces have been running to stand still—losing troops and putting in a Herculean effort just to bring the city back to the level of life that was, in 2006, widely criticized as unsatisfactory.

Except that the legacy of last year will not be forgotten easily. The memories of recent bloodshed will scar much deeper, and linger much longer, than the dints that bullets and shrapnel left on Baghdad's walls. The return of Saidiyah's residents poses its own challenges that, some American officers predict, the rest of Baghdad will have to confront as it attempts to resolve the city's deep-seated sectarian conflict. Many families return from self-imposed exile just to find their homes occupied by the families of a different sect who had moved here to find refuge from sectarian cleansing in their own parts of town.

"It hasn't become the same kind of problem it was in Bosnia," said Maj. Mike Birmingham, the planner for the First Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division. "But if it goes on longer, it can become different."

Read more reports from Anna Badkhen on Truthdig.com.