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The wooden boats float on the edge of the Tigris River, bumping each other with a deep, empty sound -- the only sound on the river at 6 a.m. The sun brings a soft haze to the water, which reflects skyscrapers from the other side. Seven ferrymen sit in the back of their motorboats. They are quiet and comfortable in one another's company, waiting for customers to ferry across the river.

Six years ago they were fishermen, not ferrymen. But now, in the Haifa neighborhood of Baghdad, sewage runs through the narrow alleyways directly into the river. Waterside restaurants stand abandoned, their owners still afraid to open their doors. The fish have disappeared.

"My family used to fish day and night. But times have changed," says Latif Mahmoud, 65, his long face heavy with wrinkles. "I catch one, two fish a day now, and sometimes even they don't show up."

Some of the fishermen blame Syria and Iran for the lack of fish. They suspect those countries of holding back the river's water supply. Others blame a lack of regulations since the government collapsed after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, allowing people to overfish.

Regardless, there aren't enough fish to even pay for fuel, Mahmoud says. A single gunshot from a bridge disturbs the quiet but is barely acknowledged.

Mahmoud exhales, a short laugh. His grandfather, he says, was also a ferryman -- he used a tire to float people across before there were working bridges. Now many bridges are closed, off-limits in the Green Zone or blocked by checkpoints. Traffic is fierce. The bridges are, again, barely usable.

Passengers arrive, announced by barking stray dogs that emerge from abandoned boats. Men and women, bound for the market across the river, stand on pieces of tin to avoid the sewage-wrecked water and step over piles of trash.

When the first boat is full, it leaves with a gentle wake. Most of the customers are regulars, crossing every day.

By Andrea Bruce, Washington Post Staff Photographer

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Flipping back a canvas tarp, 12 men squint at the dusty sun and jump, one by one, off the bed of a U.S. military transport truck, dropping to their knees in prayer. They are free.

Before their arrival at the Iraqi police headquarters in Baghdad, they were transported, hands tied, from the U.S. detention facility Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq -- a full day's drive from here. Their ironed pants and stiff new shoes were donated for their homecoming, replacing the detention-orange jumpsuits from Bucca.

Slowly, they pull each other up, their tears falling, uncontrollable after years of waiting.

And then they are forced to wait a little more. Temporarily in Iraqi police custody, the men wade through an hour of bureaucracy while their families mill about just outside the compound. For security reasons, they are then transported in Iraqi police vehicles to another neighborhood.

The trip becomes a parade. Horns blare. Kids cheer. Women pelt the police pickups with hard candy. The detainees stand and wave in the truck beds, crying as they pass old men drinking tea and selling vegetables on the streets. One family follows behind in a rusted car, yelling, driving haphazardly, eyes on their loved ones and barely on the road.

Haqi Ismaeel Awad was detained more than two years ago because, he says, the U.S. military suspected his brother of participating in the insurgency. Now he has been cleared of involvement.

Awad faces into the wind, eyes closed, feeling its force on his face as the smells and sounds of Baghdad become a reality.

When the truck pulls into a neighborhood park, Awad's parents run alongside it with their arms open. The truck's rear gate is not opened fast enough. The men jump over it and down to the road, into the embraces of mothers, wives, brothers and fathers.

Weeping, Awad's wife grabs him, holding his face in her hands, kissing one cheek, then the other.

"You look old," she says, but she smiles.

He scans the crowd past her.

Their two children are waiting for them at home, she tells him, bringing his eyes down to hers. It is still too dangerous for them to be out on the streets.

By Andrea Bruce, Washington Post Staff Photographer

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(Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post)

Lit only by the moon, its windows blacked out, a small U.S. military outpost in southern Baghdad looks abandoned. Hulking armored vehicles, still hot from a recent mission, rest on imported gravel. Bats flutter and fall like a sudden twitch in the placid night sky.

For a moment, light hits a wall of sandbags. A door opens, held by a soldier dressed in shorts. He leads the way through the building to a room smelling of microwave popcorn and locker-room sweat.

The scene looks like a basement keg party, with its fluorescent lights and worn furniture. Soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division sit in rows before the television, on any chair they can find. The soldier is greeted with a warning smack on the legs. No one stands in front of the game.

Alabama vs. Arkansas. Out of respect, most soldiers are quiet, while others lean forward to hear the football cheers and announcers -- the sounds of autumn back home. It's the first quarter, and Alabama is ahead 14-0.

"They love it. I just kind of sit here and laugh at them," says Sgt. Adam Rainville, holding the unit's "force protection dog" like a baby. Another dog sleeps under homemade bookshelves stacked with donated books, inscribed with loving notations from small Texas and Ohio towns.

Dinner, brought in from the main base, is late.

Another Alabama touchdown. 21-0. The guys swear or cheer.

During a commercial, the LT, as the lieutenant is known, stands in front of the television. Knowing how unpopular he is about to become, he takes a deep breath and tells his men to gear up. They have another mission.

A sigh of disappointment deflates the room. Some men, lips closed tight, hold back words of disappointment. Most don't.

By Andrea Bruce

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This is the place women come to make wishes.

It is a holy shrine in Irbil province, in the mountains of Kurdistan. Muslims call it Sheik Wsu Rahman, while Christians know it as Raban Buya. Once a hiding place for people fleeing religious persecution, it now has a picnic area at the bottom and a steep, zigzagging path to a high cave where four women who have just made the ascent are trying to catch their breath before beginning a series of tasks.

They all have wishes to make, but Ajeen Isamel, 15, is the main reason they are here.
"She was married four months ago," says Hasiba Siad, 43, Ajeen's mother-in-law. "We want a baby boy." Fertility is the wish of most of the shrine's pilgrims.

Nazinine Hassan, 44, slides her sheer white scarf from her head and crumples it into a ball, which quickly loosens as she tosses it into the air. The first task required at the shrine is to throw a head scarf through a natural archway in the cave. Nazinine, whose husband was killed five years ago while he was fighting for the pesh merga, the Kurdish army, wishes for money and a way to support herself. After two tries, the scarf catches briefly on a rock, then drops down on the other side. Success.

Next, the women duck into a smaller cave, slipping on the wax-covered ground. They light tall, thin candles and stick them onto a rock ledge with melting wax, then carefully leave the cave backward -- the key to this second task. Niaz Muhammed, 27, leads the way, teaching Ajeen the ritual. Also a war widow, Niaz wishes to be married again.

The third step is completed only by Ajeen and is the most important one for luck in conceiving a child. She climbs to the top of an angled rock, worn smooth by decades of childless women, and lies on her stomach. Head and hands first, she slides down the rock into the arms of the three older women, who cackle and fall back under her weight. Ajeen slides down twice more without saying a word.

As their laughter dies down, all four women search for small stones on the floor of the cave. Hasiba is the most focused, almost competitive, as she looks for the 14 stones needed for the final task. Seven are thrown to a high, man-made hole on one side of the cave and seven into a hole on the opposite side, facing the entrance.

Hasiba, yet another war widow, has breast cancer. Her wish is for good health, she says, before throwing a stone.

And for a car.

By Andrea Bruce

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Their traditional black abayas dragging at their feet, the widows seem to drift on clouds of dust between rows of trailers standing straight and metallic in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah neighborhood. These are their homes, unlike anything elsewhere in Iraq.

Noria Khalif Abdullah, 41, pulls her abaya up to her knees to mount the steep step into her trailer, where her five children are waiting. Nineteen-month-old Zahara cries at the sight of her mother, chasing her, arms up, demanding to be held. The youngest son, Hyder, 6, runs by with a broom, threatening to sweep his naked brother, who is hiding behind a door and is still wet from a shower. Maha, 13, tries to control things, hushing all of them. And in the corner, Ahmed, 11, sits on the floor, the closest approximation to privacy that he can find.

The children's father was killed in Basra because he was Shiite, Ahmed says without encouragement, slowly shedding his shyness. Then he begins to speak quickly, becoming breathless, overanxious, appearing both proud and traumatized. A year ago, his mother had found their father at the morgue -- he'd been tortured with sharp metal rods, his head and stomach pierced, before being shot dead.

"It was a time when everyone was shooting and everyone was killing," Noria adds softly, watching her son's reflection in the TV that sits dark and unused, a power cord wrapped around its base. The trailers have no electricity.

The Iraqi government opened this community of 150 trailer homes in late July to house widows and their children. Like many of the women here, Noria stayed with her parents after her husband died. But after a year with more than 25 people in one house, she and her children had worn out their welcome. She had no choice but to move her family into these foreign-looking trailers.

In the walled park, services such as electricity and water have been neglected by the government, she says. Many families left, deciding to risk their lives squatting in the empty houses nearby.

Noria cleans okra for lunch and looks out the door, which is always open to release the heat trapped inside the metal-walled trailer.

Outside, the park is quiet. Very few children are playing. Noria says she keeps her children indoors to avoid the dust and sewage. But also, she adds, just to keep them close.

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Faded ID cards wilt in the hands of the elderly women and men crowding an Iraqi policeman guarding a vaultlike door at the entrance to the Rasheed Bank in Khanaqin. The uniformed officer commands them to back away. It is not yet their turn.

Leaning on a cane, a gray-haired man exits the bank with unapologetic slowness while the policeman checks a list and calls Zakia Suleiman's number. She looks down at the young, mustached man pictured on the ID card in her hand -- her husband, dead for five years now. The card is the key to his disability check, her only income.

After she enters the closet-like darkness inside, her abaya, draped over her head, is removed and searched by female hands. The room doesn't provide the relief she was looking for. The windows are closed, for safety reasons, and there is no air conditioning.
The Rasheed Bank has a main office in Baghdad and is one of several state-owned banking companies in Iraq.

This branch in Diyala provides the salaries, pensions and disability checks for everyone living in the province. Most receive their income every two months, on their assigned day.
Only women are searched. Last week, a suicide bomber killed several people outside the local mayor's office.

Female bombers are the latest trend.

Inside the bank, the walls are cracked. The floor is black and sticky. Plastic chairs are arranged in a circle rather than a line. The wait for their money will be long. Sweat gathers on Zakia's forehead. Children spy on her from the window, they are not allowed inside.

After an hour, she is handed her small payment and leaves to buy tomatoes, cucumbers and fish. As she squeezes past the crowd outside, a woman, holding the ID of a young man, her dead son, takes Zakia's place inside the door.

By Andrea Bruce

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(Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post)

A short drive onto what remains of one of Saddam Hussein's largest military bases, past skeleton barracks and makeshift roads, a deserted hangar traps the echo of laughter. Movement -- fast, almost blurred, mostly legs -- can be spied on the other side of a broken brick wall where seven boys are kicking around a stolen shoe.

"My slipper, my slipper, you dogs! Give me my slipper!" yells a 9-year-old wearing a green-striped soccer jersey. He isn't the youngest, but he is the most earnest and, therefore, the most vulnerable to teasing. His tan plastic sandal rolls on its edge with surprising precision, then flips into the air at chest level. Stepping and tripping, the boys bump the shoe in a new direction, away from its owner. They are experts at controlling it and making it bounce like a ball.

The boys are part of a refugee community living at Camp Saad, a base on the outskirts of Baqubah that in 2003 was looted of almost everything, including window frames and light fixtures. They are squatters, Arabs forced to flee their homes in Kirkuk, to the north, when Kurds reclaimed land taken by Hussein. One man on the base estimated that hundreds of Arab families are hiding in the camp's ruins. For five years, they have lived without running water, electricity and, in most cases, doors.

Running along the wall of the courtyard, the smallest boy falls behind, his nose running. He lurches past a clownlike painting of Hussein and catches up to the others when the shoe hits a bed. Like most Iraqis, the squatters sleep outside at night to find relief from the heat.

In minutes, the boys are lying in a pile, panting. The prized sandal has returned to its owner's foot.

A U.S. military convoy passes the base, looking small in the desert distance. The boys laugh and spit. They select a new ball, a pink sandal, and one of them kicks it into the air.

By Andrea Bruce

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(Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post)

At midafternoon in Diyala, a province northeast of Baghdad, the heavy grind of military tanks calms to a distant rumble. Even war is slowed by 120-degree heat. Soldiers, American and Iraqi, move from shadow to shadow, stepping on slivers of palm-tree shade or lying under Humvees.

Three Iraqi soldiers park their Humvee outside a mud hut, away from the military convoys stopped on the main road. Nearby is a well filled with cool water, which is usually used for thirsty goats and fields of okra, but the soldiers find it perfect for bathing and washing their uniforms. They twist and scrub sweat-damaged shirts and socks and hang them between the thick metal Humvee doors and the harsh sun. In minutes, the clothes are dry.

The soldiers started their day at 2:30 a.m. Following a trail of wire and homemade fuses, they alone are in charge of defusing bombs for the Iraqi army in Diyala.

The well's owners, a local family of four siblings, feed the soldiers eggplant and eggs. One of the brothers is missing, kidnapped. Another spent two years at the U.S.-run detention facility Camp Bucca. But such circumstances are common here, and the family welcomes the three men with food and tea, hoping that now they might find their missing sheep -- stolen, they say, by al-Qaeda.

With the smell of fried eggs still in the air, Sgt. Hassan Shegas, 31, climbs into the bed of the Humvee, careful not to touch the vehicle's oven-hot metal frame. He finds his prayer rug rolled alongside bedding and boxes of water, bomb-detection devices and sticks of explosives.

Under willow-like trees he faces southwest, toward Mecca, and follows the daily ritual of his faith. He stands, bends, sits and repeats -- a prayer offered next to a gift of water.

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The cafe's dust-streaked sign is lost amid the chaos of old Baghdad. But a painted silhouette of a woman hangs above the entrance, signaling the way to an unlighted, soot-covered hallway stacked with broken generators.

Through the passage, street sounds fade and a woman's voice becomes clear. A reel-to-reel tape player is spinning the songs of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. More than 30 years after her death, she is still probably the best-known and most beloved singer in the Middle East.

Several regulars -- well-dressed men who appear to be in their 50s -- sit on benches in the multitiered room known as the Umm Kulthum Cafe. They sip tea as they listen.

"Her voice is sweet," says Waheed A. Fatia, 61, who claims to have had an Umm Kulthum obsession since he was 10. "She has layers, a rich soprano. And she performs improvised, like American jazz."

Hookah pipes bubble, the fragrant smoke competing with the harsh, unfiltered cigarette smoke from the other side of the room, where men flip dominoes or softly move a rook into check. They play from midmorning to early evening, every day, to the sad, beautiful voice of Umm Kulthum. The cafe plays nothing else.

"No one obeys laws now, or has pride," Waheed says. "No security. No stability. But through all of this," he adds, looking around the cafe, "this is the same."

Less than a minute later, four young men wearing soccer jerseys and T-shirts emerge from the hallway and approach the cafe manager. They are members of the Sons of Iraq, former insurgents now allied with U.S. forces, here to collect the monthly "protection" fee of 15,000 Iraqi dinars -- about $12.

"This used to be a good street. With a bus stop, nightlife," says Jehad el-Obeiedi, 70, a retired movie director. "They called it 'the city of singing.' There was a famous nightclub next door."

From age-blackened paintings and framed black-and-white photos, Umm Kulthum looks down over her fans from every wall of the cafe while they hum her songs.

"We listen to her every day," Obeiedi says, "as if listening to it for the first time."

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(Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post)

Lifting their arms in roller-coaster fashion, the soldiers whoop and then sing "Leaving on a Jet Plane" as their C-17 military plane takes off from Kuwait, bound for Baghdad, with a belly full of Indiana National Guardsmen.

The soldiers sit on what look like used seats from a commercial airplane, frayed and packed in tight rows like eggs in a crate. The dull gray cargo plane has smooth edges and nothing shiny -- a no-nonsense, strictly functional design. But it is boldly massive, with a 170-foot wingspan, dwarfing all other military aircraft on the airfield in Kuwait.

Staring at the dust-powdered floor, Spec. John Bickenstaff, 24, pulls at the collar of his body armor. His uniform is spotless, without sweat stains, and his boots have full tread. Summertime freckles cover his face and hands, even his forehead and sunburned neck, and he has a boyish pout. He seems unaware of the excitement around him.

This is John's first tour in Iraq. And his second flight, ever.

"I told my kids I'm going to Iraq to play Army," he says. They are 5 and 3.

Wedged between the seats and their gear, most soldiers fall asleep without tilting their heads. The plane has no windows. And the engine buzz is constant, loud and so numbing it is eventually unnoticeable.

John stays awake. He barely talks about Iraq. When he does, he shrugs, as if to say, "I just don't know."

An hour and a half later, wheels hit the ground, brakes roar like a train in a tunnel, and the soldiers wake, cargo jerking behind them. Dazed, they bang and lunge over the backpacks and rifles overflowing in the aisles, making their way out.

It's midnight. Baghdad greets them with a harsh, hot wind that stifles instead of relieves.
Soon I'll be riding on top of a Humvee, John says. A gunner in Baghdad.

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(Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post)

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Peering through a break in the barrier wall, Qasim Ali waits for his ride on al-Mawal Street near Baghdad's Sadr City district. A minibus, one of many stuck in traffic, will take him and other government workers to the Ministry of Trade, where he has worked for 30 years. This is his Monday morning commute.
The barriers, intended to protect people, have killed local businesses. Supermarkets are blocked from customers. The neighborhood is, for the most part, reachable only by foot.

Life readjusts. Ten-year-old boys sell jerrycans of gas from their perch atop the concrete structures. Brothers sell soda, candy and water outside the wall, in the traffic. Children wave goodbye to their parents and quickly disappear through the barrier gaps to school. To them, the wall is as normal as sidewalks and street signs.

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In the past, a government car picked up Qasim at his home. Now he waits behind the blast wall, built by U.S. troops. The other commuters, also waiting for rides, don't socialize. Mistrustful, scared of kidnappings, they keep their destinations and sources of income secret. Many work for Western organizations.

Before 2003, civil servants like Qasim were not allowed to own personal vehicles. After the war began, he says, they were finally free to buy.

"Even though all the models are from the '90s, most were affordable. Necessary for doing errands," Qasim says. "Now there is traffic. Work is too far away for expensive gas. And [the wall] makes it difficult for cars to enter the neighborhood."

Qasim waits. It's been almost an hour now.

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The street is a sight, the atmosphere heavy with trash odors and car exhaust. Street dogs own the sidewalks, school children jump puddles of sewage to cross the busy street, and a donkey bays at his driver's sharp whip.

But Qasim's eyes are closed.