BAGHDAD, 14 April 2003 — The fresh black paint is everywhere. “Sadr City”, it says where once the name was “Saddam City”.

Outside the Aleppo Intermediate School for Girls, I actually come across a graffiti artist in action, painting over ‘Saddam’ and again inserting ‘Sadr’. The Imam Bakr Sadr of Najaf was one of the first of Saddam’s religious victims.

The governor of Najaf, I recall, leaned toward me with special eagerness when I visited his city well over two decades ago. “Yes, we hanged him,” he said with a smile. “And his sister.”

Legend has it — all too real, I fear — that they burned off his beard with a cigarette lighter and hammered a nail into his eye before they hanged him.

So now this city of Shiite Muslim hovels, of open sewers and acres of burning garbage, of piled-up loot — buses seem to be a specialty here — this center of opposition to the Baathist regime bears the murdered imam’s name and the hopes of all that he aspired to, not least an Islamic republic.

Thus is it newly painted on another wall: “Islam and El-Sadr do not accept looters.”

And who should be a better spokesman for such worthy sentiments than Sheikh Aref Jassim Es-Saed, imam of As-Sajjad Mosque and keeper of what must be half the loot stolen from chemists’ shops across Baghdad.

Indeed, most of his mosque is piled high with medicines and dentists’ chairs and spittoons and stretchers and bandages.

“It is all to be given to the people, to be proportionately given back to hospitals who need it,” Sheikh Aref informs me, watching me carefully over the top of his thin spectacles.

“We are for stopping all this looting. We are making inventories and lists so that these things will be given back to the people of Baghdad.” There are a clutch of black-turbaned religious figures in the yard of the mosque, fussing over sacks of Vietnamese baby milk and unopened cartons labeled “Imported by the Republic of Iraq, Ministry of Trade, State Company for Foodstuffs.”

And of course, I knew where that came from. I watched the scavengers entering the Ministry of Trade four days ago. Across Sadr City — as it must now be called — there are checkpoints and barrages and armed young men with thin beards. Exactly who does run Sadr City is a moot point. The gunmen appear to be loyal to their individual mosques and they are in no mood — yet — to take on the Americans.