Can Iraq's Militias Be Tamed?

As he steps onto the streets of Baghdad's Shi'ite slum Sadr City, Saed Salah chambers a round into his pistol and shoves it into the back of his pants. A mid-ranking commander in the Mahdi Army, one of the most potent of the armed militias that have carved Baghdad into fiefdoms, Saed Salah has little to fear from the authorities. The whole neighborhood knows who he is. Motorists are aware that his fighters man the makeshift checkpoints that dot the neighborhood. Even though he has attacked U.S. troops countless times, no one will touch him. If the G.I.s could find him, they would slap him straight into Abu Ghraib prison. But that's not likely to happen. The American military may occupy Iraq, Saed Salah says, and an Iraqi Prime Minister may be in power, but neither owns these streets.

He's right. Iraqi army troops set checkpoints on the main thoroughfares in and out of Sadr City, but they are powerless in the face of the Mahdi Army. "They do nothing. They can't even stop a vehicle," says a member of a separate unit of the fractious militia as he speeds past one of the checkpoints. A pickup truck overflowing with gunmen toting AK-47s roars up from behind. Their shirts are emblazoned with the name of one of the country's most formidable armed groups: MAHDI ARMY, PROTECTION COMMITTEE, 2ND BRIGADE. As they approach the army checkpoint, no one makes a move; instead of confrontation, there is acknowledgment. A militia member waves from the pickup, and a soldier sheepishly waves back. With that, the gunmen barrel through.

In Baghdad today, the militias are consolidating their power. A wave of sectarian killings since the Feb. 22 bombing of a holy Shi'ite shrine in Samarra has left hundreds--possibly thousands--of Shi'ites and Sunnis dead across the country, with more tortured and dismembered bodies turning up each day. The U.S. military is pinning its hopes on the Iraqi army and police to stand between the two sides and bring calm to a volatile situation, but in many parts of the capital, the U.S.-backed forces wield less authority than the forces taking their orders from men like Saed Salah and his boss, the rebel anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials believe that hard-line Shi'ite militias are behind the daily abductions and executions of Sunnis and that they are doing as much to rile sectarian hatred as terrorists linked to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Yet there's also evidence that the mainstream of armed fighters on both sides is loath to allow the extremists to drag them into full-scale war--for now. In more than a dozen interviews with militia leaders, insurgent commanders and clerics, TIME sought out the men likely to be on the front lines of a full-blown sectarian conflict. What they have to say won't necessarily bolster hopes that Iraq can avoid all-out civil war indefinitely. But few militia members interviewed by TIME believe that they are fighting one now. Their assessments largely accord with those of U.S. military intelligence: that while rival death squads roam unchecked, for now civil war is in no one's interest but al-Zarqawi's. Militants on both sides say U.S. forces remain a bigger enemy than their countrymen. "The elements for civil war are all there," says a senior U.S. military-intelligence officer, "but this society is complex, and it still hasn't generated self-sustaining sectarian strife."