Several hundred families who fled the fighting in Fallujah have since retraced their steps, but they were hard to find. There were no signs of U.S. troops in the area.
But there were scattered groups of gunmen. One sat on a street corner eating his lunch out of a bowl, which hungry cats quickly set upon when he stood up to give directions, clutching his AK-47. No, he said, he did not know of any recently returned families.
Another man roared up on a motorcycle, an ammunition vest around his chest and a weapon over his shoulder. No, he could not help either.
Several blocks away, three youths with machine guns quickly wound their head scarves over their faces so they would not be identified. Down this alley, they said, was a family that had just returned.
The man of the house was Abu Ammar. He sat cross-legged on the floor, and his son served cold water. An elderly neighbor sat nearby.
"We returned three days ago," Ammar said.
Just minutes into stories of the looting of their home by thieves while they were gone, two figures appeared in the doorway.
Their faces were masked. One wore a long tribal robe, while the other had ammunition magazines strapped across his chest.
"Who is that?" Ammar's neighbor murmured.
It was clear who was in control of this neighborhood at the moment. The masked men demanded and were shown identification cards.
A short distance away, two Iraqi policemen and a civil defense patrolman sat in the shade in the middle of the main road.
One of the policemen, named Walid Faiq, stood up from the curb. He said that, as a local resident of Fallujah, "there was no difference" between him and the armed men deep inside the neighborhood's alley.
But unlike those men, he said, "We don't carry weapons."
He pointed to a sandbagged wall on the roof of a two-story building, which he said was an American sniper position.
"Our job is just to keep the two sides apart as best as we can," he said.
RSS