The Age's Paul McGeough, who has returned to Iraq, finds a community where life is better because Saddam has gone, but where it can't improve until the Americans are gone, too.
Al-Shualla should be one of George Bush's good-news stories. But the renovation of the local hospital and four of its schools seems like cold comfort for the people of this poor Shiite enclave on Baghdad's north-west fringes.
That the work has even been done must be prized out of them. Standing in a threadbare mosque, the stubble-faced Said Abdul Rashul Jabar apologises because the community cannot afford the richly coloured carpets that ordinarily adorn places of worship in Iraq. Then he sets out the change in their lives in eight months of US occupation.
"Life is the same as before," he says. But then he suggests it's worse: "We still don't have security we used to have - we have to lock ourselves in our homes at night. We have no jobs and there is no petrol. We can't get cooking gas. People are angry, very angry.
"The only good thing is that we don't have Saddam any more. Everything else is bad."
Al-Shualla is a neighbourhood of about 4000 homes. Extended families as big as 30, but sometimes with as many as 90 people, live on top of one another in cramped houses.
There is a hum in the marketplace but shopkeepers and stallholders say business is no better than before the war.
Jabar is the custodian of the mosque and a member of the local council. It's telling that he and the small crowd that gathers as we talk, have to be pressed on the renovation of the hospital and the schools. He concedes life might be better for the children of al-Shualla.
But there is something else that he has to be pressed on: on the evening of March 28 what was widely believed to be an errant US missile slammed into the local market place, killing 55 and injuring scores of people.
Jabar points to the room where the bodies of the dead are traditionally washed and bound in white cloth before burial.
"We had to wash the body of one of our teachers who was decapitated in the blast, but, of course, you were here that night. You saw it," he says. He is upset. His folded arms grip his chest more tightly.
"The pain of that night is still great. The Americans have paid no compensation to the families of the dead and we have heard nothing back from them on our petitions," he says. Running his mind's eye down the street that runs by the marketplace, he numbers the dead, house by house; then he points at people in the crowd: "That man lost three brothers in Saddam's war against Iran, two brothers of the man next to him died in the same war and three of my brothers died."
At his family's tailor shop opposite the market place, Said Adel Abed Qasim, 34, gives thanks that his sister-in-law was able to shield her four-month-old daughter from injury, even as died in the blast.
"My mother died. And my nine-year-old sister died, along with my brother's wife," he says, pain etched on his gaunt face. "Our troubles are great and our hearts are broken; this house, this family lost its mother."
In al-Shualla, a previously oppressed Shiite community that the US expected to welcome it, life is better because Saddam has gone, but it cannot improve until the Americans are gone, too. Back at the mosque, Jabar, 52, speaks with the confidence that underpins the growing political clout of the Shiite majority as it emerges from relative silence in the past eight months, pushing to become perhaps the most powerful force in shaping Iraq.
Quote:"Our hopes for liberation were so big, but the US is not meeting its promises. We will not join the armed resistance. We are waiting for our leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to tell us when and how to resist the US, then we will do it. We await Sistani's orders," he says.
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"Any Iraqi regime would be better than any foreign administration. We refuse to be occupied."
Sadly, these people are trapped in a void, relieved that Saddam is gone but now wishing that the US-led occupation forces would go, too.
As the families took their dead home on that terrible night in March, I noted the words of a turbaned Shiite cleric who tried to comfort them: "We say that we depend on God, and only God, to save us. And we pray that he will lead the Americans and the British to go away, and leave us in our land of Iraq." In al-Shualla, they are still praying.
