SADR CITY GVS

 It's the largest slum in Iraq; a breeding ground for disaffection and radicalism.

 PRAYERS

 A place of fierce religiosity, yearning for the Americans to go - and the Messiah to come. 

 MOQTADA

 Fortress of a firebrand America believes has helped set the country ablaze.

 ARCHIVE BOMB BLAST

 The outside world usually sees the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City when its enemies attack, after atrocities like the suicide bombings that killed at least 160 people there last November.

 It's rare to hear how its nearly 3 million citizens, overwhelmingly poor and Shiite, live with death day in, day out.    

CARPENTER (ABU TAYSEER): "The mosques don't have enough coffins to hold funerals, they need more."

TEACHER:

"We are a republic of widows and orphans"

VIDEO SHOP OWNERS

"People like to watch war videos, the ones with fighting against Americans in them."

MUSIC VIDEO

If you fancy curling up in front of a good video in Sadr City, this is the best you can get -

The Shiite answer to Cliff Richard with a musical tribute to the Mahdi Army.

They're the black-shirted militia who defend the sprawling suburb.

They've killed American and British troops; murdered Sunnis in revenge attacks.

 MOQTADA - AS SEEN IN VIDEO OR POSTER

But their leader - Muqtada al-Sadr - now condemns violence. Sadr City - named after his father - is his undisputed territory. And his reputation throughout Iraq as a champion of the underdog gives him a power guns never could.

 SUBTITLE: "Muqtada is our crown."

 DR MAHA'S CORTEGE  

 But his deputies have to be sure they can defend themselves.

 DR MAHA CLICKS PISTOL

 Dr Maha Adil Mahdi, mother of two young children, trained as a biochemist, isn't a natural pistol-packer.

 But she's one of the few Iraqi MPs who insists on living outside the heavy-fortified Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad. So she needs protection.

 Luckily her husband doubles up as her bodyguard. He's also her secretary.

 So who looks after the children?

 SYNC MAHA

Their aunt takes care of them!

 SYNC ABU NUR

I told you we were divorced! Only joking...   I enjoy what I'm doing.

 SYNC MAHA

We leave the children with their aunt. They call her their mum. And she looks after them till we return. When I come home, work continues. I meet constituents and listen to their complaints. We are on the Jihadi path to liberate Iraq. Me, my children, my family, my husband, we are all sacrifices to Iraq.

 Hasn't Abu Nur sacrificed his traditional status as an Arab male? 

 SYNC HUSBAND

These jobs I do, looking after the children or even cooking when the Doctor comes home from work, what I like about them is that it's God's work. As long as she's doing this Jihadi work, if it pleases God - I am with her from morning till night and I don't think of anything else because our goal is one!

TRACKING SHOTS OF CONVOY - TOP OF T18

Ring tone: ‘Get out America, get out oh Satan'

Even the mobile phone repeats that goal. It's programmed to sing: "Get out America, get out oh Satan'

THROUGH WINDOW

All the squalor and poverty Dr Maha sees in her constituency she blames on what she calls "the occupation."   

SYNC MAHA (IN CAR)

Notice that this is the main street, it's not a village street, it's the main street in the city - but it does not get level of services it needs. The pavements are not paved and the houses are very basic even though Iraq is an oil state and has immense resources. ///But all of this is because of the occupation.

Promises of development have been broken, she says. And so have promises of security.

DR. MAHA CONVOY

Even on her home turf, she travels in a two-car convoy.

MAHA ARRIVES IN SCHOOL

She's visiting a school for Shiite girls whose mothers or fathers have been killed in the violence of the last four years.

 SCHOOL EXTERIORS - GOATS

It's in one of the poorest districts of the suburb. The Americans have spent $64 million since 2003 to bring new sewers, power lines and other services to Sadr City.

But improvements round here are hard to spot.

ENGLISH LESSON

UPSOF 

Most of the pupils have fled here with relatives from other more dangerous parts of Baghdad, or from beyond the capital.

They've been found places at the school by Muqtada al-Sadr's men. 

BLACK SCARF

The black headscarf's a sign this girl's lost a parent very recently.     

GIRL'S SYNC

My mother cannot talk to us about my father's death.  When my little sister asks, she tells her he's gone out to buy bananas for us.

Through the suffering in this one room you can gauge the whole unplumbed depth of Iraq's nightmare.

There's killing of every kind, targeted, random and accidental.  

SYNC ASMA KARIM KAZEM (PRINCIPAL)

We have a girl called Betul - her father was killed by an American officer. There is another girl called Amal - her father was killed on the way to Amman by the terrorists. And there is this other girl called Aayan and her father was killed in the Adhamiyah district in a sectarian killing - we call it murder by identity card.  And another who is called Hanan, whose father was martyred in a terrorist explosion in Sadr City where he was working as a building labourer and he was standing in the middle of a crowd of labourers and was killed there.

SAYING GOODBYE TO PRINCIPAL

Dr Maha promises to lobby for more funds for the school. Some of the girls' families, she says, live on only a dollar a day.

GETS INTO CAR AND DRIVES OFF

But Sadr City's a constituency where almost everyone's in need...  It was built as Revolution City back in the late 1950s - on land given mainly to poor Shiite families who'd migrated from the south of Iraq.

ARCHIVE SADDAM

Saddam renamed it after himself - Saddam City. But he and his Sunni elite weren't prepared to spend much money on it.

MOQTADA AND FATHER POSTER

Now it's called Sadr City after Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr - a revered cleric murdered, apparently on Saddam's orders, in 1999.

Shiites - the majority in Iraq - are free now to honour their heroes and martyrs.

 REFUGEE CITY

 But letters like this leave them feeling as persecuted as ever.

It's a death threat, signed by Sunni extremists, that's forced a family of Shiite farmers to flee here from their home in Diyala, north-east of the capital.

Here where Sadr City meets the desert ever more makeshift homes are being thrown up by refugees running for their lives.

SYNC MOHAMMED JASEM MOHAMMED

They send water here once a month. Why should our children take a bath only once a month? A tanker brings the water - luckily we don't have to pay - but when it doesn't come the children don't even have drinking water, so how could they possibly have a bath? 10.13.20

Every day, he says, another dozen or so shelters are built - housing a few more of the four million Iraqis - perhaps one in seven of the population - who are currently displaced from their homes.   

Look at these clay bricks, people live inside here despite the scorpions and snakes that come out. And look at this one; they just stopped building this house because there wasn't enough money.

POTS

They can bring only a few remains of their former lives.

But they never forget the portrait of the founders of Shiism.

This woman got away only after another martyr was added to the roll-call

- her husband Ahmed.

He was taken away one night by unknown men in masks. Next day his corpse was found on a bridge.

 SYNC WIDOW

He was a good husband and you can even ask anyone and they will say how come it happened to Ahmad? He didn't have any connection to all to these things. I am still shocked he was killed. I don't know why they killed him. Now what shall I do with four children?  I can't provide for them.  There's no wages, no one asks how I'm going to manage, no one cares. I don't know. And it's not only me - lots of people ask ‘why is it like this?' ... Who can I talk to? These four children, deprived of their father, why?  What is my life now? What is their life? No wages, no breadwinner, no-one to take care of them. Why is it like this, why did this happen to us?

CARPENTER

Death now provides the only growth industry in Sadr City.

Abu Tayseer runs a small joinery company that once specialized in furniture wardrobes for newly married couples.

Now orders for wardrobes are getting rarer. But the design of a coffin isn't so different.  

SYNC ABU TAYSEER

Because of the current situation in our country, with more explosions and bombings, we have more killings than marriages! We estimate that now, you need ten times as many coffins as before.

10.19.59 We used to have two rivers in Iraq the Tigris and the Euphrates. Now we have a third river which I call the Red River because of all the bombings and killings.

SOCIAL SERVICES OFFICE

Those who've lost relatives come here - to an office run by Muqtada al-Sadr's organisation - for the support that's often unavailable from the state.

HANDING OUT FLOUR AND RICE

It's a battle for hearts and minds more successful than any the Americans have waged - a parallel social services network reminiscent of what that other Shiite organisation, Hezbollah, has developed in Lebanon.   

POSTERS OF MOQTADA'S FATHER

It was Grand Ayatollah al-Sadr who first developed a system to help the needy.   

CLOSE UP OF MOQTADA - OR ARCHIVE OF HIM WITH FATHER 

Muqtada was the youngest son, far inferior to his father in learning. 

But able to inherit much of his authority.

DR MAHA AND PHOTOS  

Dr Maha grew up in a mixed family - her father was Sunni.

It was while she was at university that she converted to Shiism -

Encouraged by the young calligrapher who wrote out her dissertation and became her husband. He was an adherent of Sadr senior.

MAHA SYNC

We didn't find anyone to fill the place of Mohammad Sadeq Al-Sadr. That man changed my life. He taught me the truth, the truth of God may He be praised, the truth of Islam. I was lost before I found him.

FRIDAY PRAYERS

Bad weather can't deter the faithful from turning out for Friday prayers in Sadr City.  It's a religious duty...

IMAM WITH MUQTADA'S FATHER BEHIND  

...but following the tradition set by Muqtada's father, the sermons here are resolutely political.

SERMON

The people demand that the occupiers leave - by their own volition.

MUQTADA POSTER

That's Muqtada's line. He's the only Shiite politician who's consistently opposed the US presence.

He had six ministers from his party in the government. But he's pulled them out because there's no timetable for US withdrawal.

UPSOF YOUNG MEN

We come to prayers to say no to Americans

But these worshippers don't just want political liberation. They want redemption - the blessed era that will be ushered in by the second coming of the Mahdi, the Shiites mysterious lost imam, after whom Muqtada's army is named.

Some believe he's just about to appear - maybe right here in Sadr City. And they're convinced it was to stop him that America - egged on by Israel - invaded their country.

SYNC MAHA (OFFICE)

This occupation came here for Imam Mahdi, to blockade his bases and followers. Because they knew that anyone who went out of this city would go to fight the Americans.

It's a notion Muqtada's father held dear - that an "evil trinity" of America, Israel - and Britain - is behind all the world's troubles.

ARCHIVE SAMARA

But it must have been severely tested by last year's explosion at one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq - the golden-domed al-Askari Mosque in Samara. A coldly calculated attempt to ignite war between Muslim and Muslim...

It was the work, almost certainly, of al-Qaeda in Iraq. A network of foreign Arab fighters and diehard officials of Saddam's regime.

DRIVING  

We're going to meet one man who miraculously escaped death at their hands...a male nurse abducted from a taxi along with three other Shiite passengers. The gang - apparently an Iraqi, a Syrian and an Egyptian - wanted revenge for the execution by the Government of Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half brother. They chose their first victim from among the captives and prepared to "sacrifice" him. 

SYNC MEHDI JABBAR MUHARREB AL-OTAIBI  

There was an Egyptian with them who was in charge of slaughtering people. He was holding a piece of metal made from a tin can in the shape of a cleaver with a very sharp edge. He made one of the hostages lie down and cut his throat. We all fainted when we saw all that blood gushing out. Then they took another one of us and did the same to him. They told me that the time for my execution would be three-thirty because this was the time that Barzan al-Tikriti was executed.

It was Hussein, he believes, who saved him. The seventh-century Shiite saint came to him that night in a dream - and next morning he was inexplicably freed.

MAHA IN CAR

But horror stories like that won't change Dr Maha's views. Al-Qaeda, she says, is just a tool of the Pentagon.

SYNC MAHA  

MAHA: America, Britain and Israel are financing the terrorists to hit the Iraqi people. Terrorists couldn't do this without the occupiers.

MAZIAR: But the terrorists kill a lot of Americans too, not only Iraqis.

MAHA: How many did they kill?

MAZIAR: About 3,500

MAHA: No problem for the protection of Israel! It's not many! I warned the American people that our enemy and theirs is one, the Jews.

 ARCHIVE SURGE PIX AND HELICOPTERS OVERHEAD

But American forces - pursuing more straightforward logic - are fighting a real enemy - sectarian death squads - in their last-ditch effort to bring security to Baghdad.

Since the beginning of the so-called "surge", they've raided Sadr City almost every night - searching sometimes for Mahdi Army fighters.

Unusually, there's been no serious resistance. Muqtada ordered his men to lie low.

His followers insist the Americans are hitting the wrong targets - including Sadr City's main children's hospital.

SYNC SECURITY GUARD

This is where the American vehicles stopped, see that car parked there, and they carried on firing at the hospital. We reached here and saw them and immediately went back; we were afraid they would see our weapons and fire. We heard the screams of the women upstairs so we rushed upstairs.

He says the shooting started at 3.30 in the morning and lasted an hour and a half.   

INCUBATOR ROOM

Had there been a baby in this incubator, it would barely have escaped death. 

SYNC MOTHER

 We were sleeping here in the hospital and we heard shots being fired. Their traces are here. Afterwards the room became full of smoke and we ran away.

The American-led multinational forces say they have no record of any incident here on that date.

INSIDE REST OF HOSPITAL - TOUR

And you'd think there'd be sympathy with America here - it supplies the hospital with medicine and equipment, and there was a $3m grant from Washington to renovate the building. 

DEPUTY DIRECTOR TOUR 

But the deputy director still dissatisfied.

The Americans always lie. We met them when building started, two years ago, and they made lots of big promises to us like that we would be a model hospital. We made a few simple requests, for example a consulting clinic outside the main building and a thalassemia ward and an outpatients' clinic. They agreed at first but a few months later they broke their promises and didn't do anything.

For now every extra bit of anti-American resentment flows into Muqtada's bid for power.

He's of the few Iraqi politicians who's posed as a national leader, aiming to bring Shiites and Sunnis together.

But for all his rhetoric, it's not clear what he can offer the people of Sadr City - or Iraq.

DR MAHA 

Our demands are clear and are in the interests of the Iraqi people. We want a timetable for Iraqi withdrawal, to drive away the oppressors and prove services for Iraqi citizens. None of that's been achieved until now. We don't have any other demands related to our personal interests or ministerial portfolios, nothing.

 DRIVING ROUND SADR CITY

But Sadr City's seen no useful laws produced by the parliament she belongs to and her party's withdrawal from the government leaves it even less representative or able to function.

 SCHOOL

Back in the school she visits, they're learning words many of them no longer have much use for in their own families.

STUDENTS: Mother - father

The state provides a small daily treat. It can't provide the security to stop schools filling with more orphans.

DR MAHA LEAVES

Dr Maha, as usual, blames the Americans - and looks forward to an Islamic government led by the Messiah.

CAR DRIVES AWAY

But that's a dream that's unlikely to replace Sadr City's nightmare any time soon.