LITTLE IRAQ.

A Portfolio of photographs from an Iraqi-exile community in Amman, Jordan

Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad

Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan

Seymour M. Hersh on Rumsfeld's war plan

A little before noon on the morning of the first Friday of the war between the United States and Iraq, men were sweeping the small front yard of the pretty, hexagonal Al Tabba Mosque in Amman. The staff and a few customers at a nearby coffeehouse were gathered around a television in the corner, watching Al Jazeera's reports of the fighting near Basra, interviews with Kurdish refugees in the north, and U.S. claims that Iraqis were surrendering in the south. The mosque is on an unpaved road, near the bottom of one of Amman's seven hills, just off Garden Street, where there are many small stores dedicated to the paraphernalia of twenty-first-century technology--cell phones and computer cables, modems and adapters of all kinds. They were shut for the Muslim day of rest, and the neighborhood was quiet.

The imam of the mosque had agreed to talk to me after midday prayers, and I was waiting near the gates, on a purple plastic stool that someone had thoughtfully put out for me. Opposite my perch three men removed crates of fruit from the back of a van. Another man maneuvered a cart heaped with fresh almonds, still juicy in their downy green shells. A slight, dark man with long, tightly curled black hair laid out a mat some fifteen feet long beside me and built a small tower of plastic wastebaskets at one end. He removed more items from crates and dusted each one carefully with a red broom before he added it to his meticulous display: packs of plastic clothespins; stainless-steel mugs; brightly painted trays; a column of rolls of adhesive tape, balanced one on top of the other; a small pile of cheap prayer mats in neon colors. Metal frying pans were arranged next to plastic badminton racquets and rubber gloves. He brushed off several packs of thread and put them beside some kitchen knives and scissors, then built a pyramid with three jars of Vaseline. Expandable wooden coatracks made up a six-story tower.

Worshippers, hunched against a biting wind, faces sombre, their heads full, perhaps, of the television images of the previous night's bombing of Baghdad, began to arrive at the mosque. They looked at me, unsmiling, and went inside, where the imam was well into his warmup oration. I could hear him complaining about the effects of globalization on Muslim women. It was making them more Western, he lamented, and Islam was being weakened.