AL-FAW, Iraq, 7 March 2004 — Trembling in fear, an Iraqi youth admits his identity card is forged, but denies he has come to this corner of southeastern Iraq with evil intent. His questioners, members of a Shiite organization that says it has put its militia past behind it, use no physical duress on their suspect, picked up begging in the bazaar after locals decided he was too neatly dressed to be destitute.

Two policemen appear at the Badr group’s makeshift office in Al-Faw, 90 kilometers south of Basra, and take the youth away, saying they will run him out of town with a warning.

With Arbaeen, a major Shiite religious occasion only days away, southerners fear a repeat of March’s devastating bombings in Karbala and Baghdad at the height of Ashura, the 10th of Muharram.

Iraqi police and paramilitaries trained by the country’s US-British occupiers are taking on a bigger role in fighting insurgents, but Saddam Hussein’s former foes believe they can also contribute.

Basra, controlled by British forces, has enjoyed relative calm compared to the violence in areas further north, and most people in the region want to keep it that way.

“Our most important role is to keep security,” Abbas Manahi, leader of 50 members of the former Badr Brigade, said in Al-Faw, at the tip of a peninsula captured and held by Iran from 1986 to 1988.

The Badr Brigade was the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), based in Tehran until Saddam’s overthrow a year ago. It fought on Iran’s side in the 1980-88 war, and joined a Shiite uprising brutally crushed by Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War. “Now we have no enemy so we don’t need a militia and we don’t carry guns,” Manahi said. “We cooperate with the police and help catch smugglers, looters and carjackers.

“We are a political party now and we are establishing ourselves for future elections.” The group may have put its guns away, but it has not disarmed, perhaps mindful of potential Shiite rivals such as the Mehdi Army of firebrand cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and others.

At least 30 people were killed on Sunday when Mehdi Army gunmen and protesters fought Spanish-led troops in Najaf. A protest by Sadr supporters in Baghdad also turned violent.

SCIRI leaders say Badr, Kurdish peshmerga and other militias that fought Saddam should help with security until Iraqi police and armed forces can deal with bombers and rebels.

US administrator Paul Bremer frowns on the militias and a de facto constitution passed by the Iraqi Governing Council last month bans them unless they are under government command.

But it allows the Kurds to keep control of police and security forces in their autonomous northern region.

In the south, British forces leading 14,000 multinational troops in four provinces take a pragmatic view. “Militias are not to carry arms or have a security role, but we recognize that they, like tribes in some areas, are part of the landscape,” said military spokesman Major Tim Smith.

“Some militia elements act beyond the law,” he said, citing Tharallah, a small Islamist group whose supporters used iron bars last week against British soldiers trying to evict them from a building in Basra which they had occupied illegally. Smith said Iraqi police were gaining confidence in the south but it would take time for people to overcome their fear of a force used by Saddam for repression. They are certainly visible on Basra streets - and audible, with the sirens of 140 new police cars delivered this month competing with the incessant whistles of traffic policemen.

Some Basra residents, however, complain that the police are still keener on taking bribes than fighting crime.

The Ashura bombings, which killed at least 171 people, prompted Bremer to announce new efforts to secure Iraq’s borders and prevent a suspected inflow of Islamist militants.

He closed 16 crossing points on the Iranian border. At Shalamcheh, one of three that remain open, Col. Dhafer Al-Jannabi told reporters his border police had caught some drug smugglers, but no armed infiltrators so far.

“We arrested three suspects,” he said. “One Iraqi, an Afghan and a Saudi.” At the Shalamcheh crossing, 30 kilometers east of Basra, border guards, customs men and immigration police were gearing up for a flood of Iranian pilgrims, many of them elderly, wishing to mark Arbaeen at Najaf and Karbala.

They must cross a small concrete bridge across a canal at the frontier before heading for Basra across a desert wasteland scarred by rusty barbed wire, charred tanks, trenches and earth fortifications, relics of the Iran-Iraq war.

Brig. Ali Al-Taher, commander of the border police in the south, promised a substantial tightening of control.

“In the coming months, you will see a big change that will reflect positively on local security and on economic development, which are linked together,” he declared.