IRAQ'S BLOODY SUMMER.

One morning a few days before Qusay and Uday Hussein were killed in Mosul, I had an appointment with the Imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Adhamiya, a traditionally pro-Baathist, predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the northwestern part of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein made his final public appearance outside the mosque on April 9th, and for several days afterward his fedayeen and Baathist militias fought the Americans in Adhamiya, staging a kind of last stand before melting away. I was travelling with Sabah, my driver, and Salih, a translator. As we began negotiating Adhamiya's narrow streets, I thought I heard a few gunshots, which would have been unusual when Saddam was running the city but was not now. A Humvee was blocking a side road, and an American soldier sat behind some sandbags in front of a building that Salih thought was the Adhamiya police station. A couple of blocks farther on, several more shots rang out, and two men in civilian clothes trotted toward us, firing pistols. At that moment, a blue van pulled in front of our car, and the two men with the guns broke into a run.

I yelled at Sabah to get us out of there, quickly, but we were stuck in traffic, behind the blue van. I looked back and saw that the men with guns were about thirty feet away, standing abreast, with their legs wide apart, arms outstretched and hands pressed together, pointing their weapons in our direction. Salih and I ducked below our seats and I heard the bangs of the pistols, but nothing hit us. Some car horns blared. The blue van sped down a side street and Sabah followed it. The van turned to the right, and Sabah turned right also, and suddenly we were in a dead-end lane. The driver of the van threw open his door, leaped out, and ran off in a crouch. Sabah jerked our car into reverse and pulled back into the street and then put the car into forward and accelerated--a cumbersome process that seemed to take forever. The two men with the guns had reappeared in their shooting stance. This time, with no other vehicles in sight, they were obviously aiming at us. But they paused. They didn't shoot, and in a few seconds we had got out of their line of fire.

Salih tried to calm me as we made our way to the mosque, which was only a few blocks away. There was a gaping hole in the yellow brick minaret at the front, where it had been hit by tank fire on April 10th, after the neighborhood came out to greet Saddam. Salih walked me around a garden at the back of the mosque, past a new martyrs' cemetery for victims of the fighting during the last days of the war. Several dozen gravestones had been placed in a shady area under some date palms. The temperature was approaching a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit by now, and we went inside, where it was cool, and sat on the floor of the prayer hall, leaning against a pillar. The tomb of Abu Hanifa, one of the Sunnis' most revered holy men, was in the center of the hall, behind glass. A couple of men were sleeping nearby, and others were stretched out, reading. It was exam week in Iraq, and many students go to mosques to study. A boy came over with a pitcher and poured glasses of cold water for us.

We were escorted to the Imam's reception room in a pleasantly air-conditioned side building. Velour-covered chairs and little coffee tables were arranged around the sides of the room, as in a diwan, the traditional Arab meeting place. A young boy came in and sat quietly beside me. Salih said he was the Imam's son. His father, a beefy man wearing glasses and a white robe and a skullcap, entered a few minutes later, mopping the sweat from his brow. He introduced himself and sat next to the boy. Two men in street clothes sat at the other end of the room.

The Imam, Mouyad Al-Aadhami, is from one of Adhamiya's oldest families. He had been appointed Imam of the mosque after the previous Imam, a notorious supporter of Saddam, was ousted. I asked him about Adhamiya's reputation as a pro-Saddam neighborhood. "This is false," he said. Saddam's final appearance there was "one of the tricks he used to make the Americans believe the people of Adhamiya like him. In fact, they don't like him." The people of Adhamiya, like people in Iraq everywhere, had been victims of Saddam's brutality: "He hanged people here, and people were watched and followed." Nonetheless, I said, several American military officers had told me that Adhamiya was a center of guerrilla resistance against their forces. "I don't agree," he said, curtly. "The area is tribal and religious, and the people here reject occupation. The Sunni people are not the only ones who oppose the occupiers. Our brothers, the Shia, began the resistance first. The southern tribes rose up and sacrificed themselves and their sons for the defense of their country."

I asked him what southern resistance he was referring to, exactly. Southern Iraq was largely peaceful. Most of the attacks against Americans were taking place in the so-called Sunni triangle, the base of which is between Fallujah and Baghdad, and the apex at Tikrit, Saddam's home town, ninety miles north. The Imam explained that he meant the resistance offered to American marines during the invasion. He said that there had been many more acts of resistance since then. When I said that I had not heard of many, he said, conspiratorially, that "they are kept away from the media."

"So, what do you think of this kind of action?" I said. "Do you approve of it?"