But on the evening of Aug. 2, the 49-year-old Vincent became the first American journalist to be murdered while reporting from the belly of Iraq. Back in the 1990’s, he had never devoted much mental energy to Middle East politics. But after his conversion moment of watching the Twin Towers collapse on Sept. 11, he became preoccupied—even obsessed—with the idea of an epic struggle between “democracy” and “radical Islam.” With a convert’s zeal, he gave up the glossy world of art galleries and openings and devoted himself to the story of Iraq.

“I will not be fatuous saying he died doing what he loved, but he did die doing what he thought was right and important,” said his wife, Lisa Ramaci-Vincent.

At the time of his death, Vincent had been living in the southern Iraqi city of Basra for over three months, freelancing for magazines like National Review and Harper’s. His mission, he’d told friends, was to find the “soul” of Basra, to write a book about its storied past and rosy future. But the city’s bloody present caught up with him.

Shortly before 7 p.m. on Aug. 2, Vincent and his translator, Nouraya Tuaiz, also known as Nour al-Khal, were snatched from a bustling street in downtown Basra by four or five gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms. Five hours later, Vincent’s body was found on a road less than 10 minutes from the city center. He appeared to have been beaten and then shot three times, while Ms. Tuaiz had been shot at least twice. Remarkably, she managed to survive.

The news of Vincent’s death struck deep into the motley heart of his old downtown crowd, which had, until then, remained largely insulated from the bloodletting of the Iraq war. Within several hours of his death, a small shrine of flowers—daisies, lilies and pale white roses—had sprouted up outside his building. And in conversations with The Observer, friends choked up and sobbed as they recalled the quirky character who had made the unlikely transition from glam gadabout and art-scene eccentric to freelance war correspondent. Still, even as they struggled with the shock of his murder, a number of Vincent’s friends admitted that they’d feared getting this news for some time.

“We were all a little afraid for Steve going to Basra, even though he thought Basra was safe compared to Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle,” said Charlie Finch, a fellow art critic and close friend of Vincent. “His friends were telling him, ‘Don’t push your luck’ …. But he was just drawn like a moth to a flame.”

In the long days since his death, Vincent’s wife and friends have struggled to parse the grizzly circumstances of his kidnapping and murder. Privately, some friends have focused on his open friendship with Ms. Tuaiz, an unmarried Islamic woman, suggesting that he may have been the victim of an “honor killing” by Shiite fundamentalists. Others, however, have returned again and again to recent e-mails he’d sent in which he revealed that he’d stumbled on potentially damning information about the rising influence of radical Shiite religious parties in Basra.

“He wrote me in an e-mail about three weeks before he was killed saying that if he went public with a lot of the information he had, he would get disappeared,” said Steven Mumford, a New York–based artist who became tight with Vincent when the two shared an apartment in Baghdad in early 2004. “He actually said if he went public ‘in a major venue.’”

Nonetheless, on Sunday, July 31, for reasons none of his friends quite know, Vincent did just that. In a blistering article on The New York Times’ Op-Ed page, he warned that members of radical Shiite parties had begun taking over the police force, unleashing a religiously based vigilante justice that included political assassinations. “There is even a sort of ‘death car,’” Vincent wrote, “a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.”

Two days later, of course, a white car carrying armed men came for Vincent as he stood outside a money-changing shop. Witnesses said he struggled with the men for several minutes, fighting so hard that he lost his shoes in the scuffle. When the car finally pulled away, his shoes were still in the street.

To hear his friends tell it, Vincent was always a dramatic soul, a restless seeker eternally on the hunt for some greater meaning. Small and handsome, with dark, chiseled features that gave him a certain Billy B ob Thornton quality (at least in pictures), he had an actor’s flare for spectacle and a romantic’s drive for passion. He was quirky, unconventional, confounding and, at 49, he still couldn’t be easily classified.

To the painter Damien Loeb, for instance, Vincent was “an odd combination of shameless hedonist and a conservative ex-hippie.” To the artist Grace Roselli, he was “chaos-driven; he was romance.” And to Charlie Finch, well, he was nothing less than a Candide figure, “always rushing into things and trying to see the best in people.” But, Mr. Finch warned, he was also very operatic.

“Steve’s Armenian by descent,” Mr. Finch explained. “His grandmother’s family was wiped out by the Turks in the genocide in 1915, and he always had a kind of love affair with the darker sides of things.”

Vincent was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in suburban Sunnyvale, Calif., the son of a 1950’s stay-at-home mom and a dad who worked for the United States General Accounting Office. He loved language from an early age, and in 1979 he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in English and a dream of becoming the next Jack Kerouac. Eager for his own On the Road experience, he hitchhiked his way to New York City in 1980, where he embarked on an appropriately Kerouacian career as a waiter, security guard at the Metropolitan Museum and fearless New York City cab driver.

Two years after arriving in the city, Vincent met his future wife in the lobby of a movie theater where they’d both gone to see the Mel Gibson film Road Warrior. Over 20 years later, Ms. ­Ramaci-Vincent can still recite the date as if it were a favorite poem: Oct. 10, 1982. Back then, she was living a homesteader’s life in an East Village squat; less than a year later, he had moved, becoming her partner in everything from films to travel to “conservative Jacksonian” politics.

“When people used to talk about us, they used to say ‘Steve and Lisa,’” Ms. Ramaci-Vincent recalled. “It was always both of us, because the things he was interested in, I was interested in, and vice versa—although he liked gin martinis a hell of a lot more than I did.”

By 1990, the two had settled into a cozy East Village life together, and Vincent had begun making the transition from jack-of-all-trades to art-world journo. He was a dogged reporter, and he climbed the glossy rungs of this world quickly, but friends said he was also restless, anxious for something transcendent. For a time, he found it in the kaleidoscopic funhouse of the downtown fetish scene, where he often served as a “gentleman escort” for his friend the Baroness, a ruby-haired latex dominatrix. But after several years, that lost its intrigue as well.

“I would say he was looking for something to immerse himself completely and wholly from the day I met him,” said the artist Inka Essenhigh, who got to know Vincent while he was covering the art beat in the late 1990’s. “I think he was just looking for passion.”

And then, in 2003, the war began.

Vincent was initially drawn to Iraq in September 2003, during the early pre-insurgent calm that initially followed the U.S. invasion. A gung-ho supporter of the war, he chose to go because he was too old to enlist in the Army but still wanted to participate in what he called “the greatest event of [his] lifetime”: the war against “Islamofascism.” Or so he wrote in In the Red Zone, the book he published after his first two visits to Iraq.

The fight against “Islamofascism” was Vincent’s rallying cry. In the months after 9/11, he had boned up on Islam, and before long he’d developed a theory about Iraq as the “key” to a democratic revolution in the Middle East. It didn’t seem to matter to him that Islamic fundamentalism wasn’t much of a force in prewar Iraq, and he didn’t seem to care that most of his East Village neighbors were busy marching against the invasion. Vincent had often been the resident outsider, and frankly he kind of liked it, friends said.

“I cared little about ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ less about Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein,” he wrote in the opening chapter of In the Red Zone. “No, I envisioned the liberation of that country as a way to cure the Arab stagnation that had increasingly begun to infect the world.”

This theory didn’t survive completely intact under the harsh glare of the Iraqi sun. While Vincent remained staunchly pro-war until his death, he was disappointed by the failure of the reality of the U.S. invasion to live up to the dream. Particularly during his final stint in Basra, the notion that the city was being transformed under his eyes into a strict religious theocracy weighed heavily on him.

“He really wanted to call attention to the fact that, with the British looking on, Basra would become a fascist city,” said his wife.

But these realizations unfolded gradually. During his first one or two visits, Vincent was rather love-struck by certain aspects of Iraqi culture, several friends said. With characteristic zeal, he adopted Arabic idioms in his writing, collected Shiite posters, and even sported an abiya and kheffiya for a time—until, that is, he was pulled over one day by suspicious officers in Basra (the outfit, he was told, made him look like a Wahhabi terrorist).

“The volume was really turned up to 10 on basically everything about Shia culture, and he really responded to that,” Mr. Mumford recalled. “He had this deep fascination, love and envy of people who had an absolutely clear faith, even if it was absolutist in nature.”

But of all the Iraqis he befriended, Vincent reserved particularly strong feelings for his translator, Ms. Tuaiz. The two had met at a Basra Writers’ Union meeting during his second trip to the country, and she quickly became his guide through Basran society, the sidekick who accompanied him on all of his adventures and frequently appeared in his blog posts under the pseudonym Layla. In the chapter Vincent devoted to her in his book, he described her as “charming, extroverted, English-speaking, candid,” and declared, “I would do anything to help this woman.”

At 31 years old, Ms. Tuaiz made for an understandably compelling character. She’d been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein (allegedly for writing a satirical poem), beaten by her brothers, and subjected to all the injustices of being a woman in a strict patriarchy—and yet she trudged on.

“Steve embodied all of Iraq in Nour; he felt that she is the future of Iraq that could solve the problems of the Middle East,” Mr. Mumford explained. “But I think he was also moved on a very personal level by Nour …. He had this very gallant, kind of old-fashioned notion of chivalry; he wanted to save her.”

But for all these noble notions, Vincent’s open friendship with Ms. Tuaiz may have proved naïve, or even dangerous, in the social tinderbox of present-day Basra. As Vincent had himself documented, Iraq’s second-largest city was becoming an increasingly religious place, another militant Shiite outpost where gender relations were strictly policed. Men and women simply didn’t carry on public friendships. And while Ms. Ramaci-Vincent maintained that the relationship between her husband and his translator was strictly platonic, the mere suggestion of something deeper between an unmarried Iraqi woman and a Western man could prove deadly.

Vincent no doubt knew this all too well. But, as friends recalled, he was also a great admirer of larger-than-life figures like Lawrence of Arabia.

“The whole thing about the knight in shining armor—that was Steven. He just had this sort of noble thing,” Ms. Roselli said. “He was probably the most interesting man I had ever met. There’s nobody else like him. He’s going to be terribly missed.”

But on the evening of Aug. 2, the 49-year-old Vincent became the first American journalist to be murdered while reporting from the belly of Iraq. Back in the 1990’s, he had never devoted much mental energy to Middle East politics. But after his conversion moment of watching the Twin Towers collapse on Sept. 11, he became preoccupied—even obsessed—with the idea of an epic struggle between “democracy” and “radical Islam.” With a convert’s zeal, he gave up the glossy world of art galleries and openings and devoted himself to the story of Iraq.

“I will not be fatuous saying he died doing what he loved, but he did die doing what he thought was right and important,” said his wife, Lisa Ramaci-Vincent.

At the time of his death, Vincent had been living in the southern Iraqi city of Basra for over three months, freelancing for magazines like National Review and Harper’s. His mission, he’d told friends, was to find the “soul” of Basra, to write a book about its storied past and rosy future. But the city’s bloody present caught up with him.

Shortly before 7 p.m. on Aug. 2, Vincent and his translator, Nouraya Tuaiz, also known as Nour al-Khal, were snatched from a bustling street in downtown Basra by four or five gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms. Five hours later, Vincent’s body was found on a road less than 10 minutes from the city center. He appeared to have been beaten and then shot three times, while Ms. Tuaiz had been shot at least twice. Remarkably, she managed to survive.

The news of Vincent’s death struck deep into the motley heart of his old downtown crowd, which had, until then, remained largely insulated from the bloodletting of the Iraq war. Within several hours of his death, a small shrine of flowers—daisies, lilies and pale white roses—had sprouted up outside his building. And in conversations with The Observer, friends choked up and sobbed as they recalled the quirky character who had made the unlikely transition from glam gadabout and art-scene eccentric to freelance war correspondent. Still, even as they struggled with the shock of his murder, a number of Vincent’s friends admitted that they’d feared getting this news for some time.

“We were all a little afraid for Steve going to Basra, even though he thought Basra was safe compared to Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle,” said Charlie Finch, a fellow art critic and close friend of Vincent. “His friends were telling him, ‘Don’t push your luck’ …. But he was just drawn like a moth to a flame.”

In the long days since his death, Vincent’s wife and friends have struggled to parse the grizzly circumstances of his kidnapping and murder. Privately, some friends have focused on his open friendship with Ms. Tuaiz, an unmarried Islamic woman, suggesting that he may have been the victim of an “honor killing” by Shiite fundamentalists. Others, however, have returned again and again to recent e-mails he’d sent in which he revealed that he’d stumbled on potentially damning information about the rising influence of radical Shiite religious parties in Basra.

“He wrote me in an e-mail about three weeks before he was killed saying that if he went public with a lot of the information he had, he would get disappeared,” said Steven Mumford, a New York–based artist who became tight with Vincent when the two shared an apartment in Baghdad in early 2004. “He actually said if he went public ‘in a major venue.’”

Nonetheless, on Sunday, July 31, for reasons none of his friends quite know, Vincent did just that. In a blistering article on The New York Times’ Op-Ed page, he warned that members of radical Shiite parties had begun taking over the police force, unleashing a religiously based vigilante justice that included political assassinations. “There is even a sort of ‘death car,’” Vincent wrote, “a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.”

Two days later, of course, a white car carrying armed men came for Vincent as he stood outside a money-changing shop. Witnesses said he struggled with the men for several minutes, fighting so hard that he lost his shoes in the scuffle. When the car finally pulled away, his shoes were still in the street.

To hear his friends tell it, Vincent was always a dramatic soul, a restless seeker eternally on the hunt for some greater meaning. Small and handsome, with dark, chiseled features that gave him a certain Billy B ob Thornton quality (at least in pictures), he had an actor’s flare for spectacle and a romantic’s drive for passion. He was quirky, unconventional, confounding and, at 49, he still couldn’t be easily classified.

To the painter Damien Loeb, for instance, Vincent was “an odd combination of shameless hedonist and a conservative ex-hippie.” To the artist Grace Roselli, he was “chaos-driven; he was romance.” And to Charlie Finch, well, he was nothing less than a Candide figure, “always rushing into things and trying to see the best in people.” But, Mr. Finch warned, he was also very operatic.

“Steve’s Armenian by descent,” Mr. Finch explained. “His grandmother’s family was wiped out by the Turks in the genocide in 1915, and he always had a kind of love affair with the darker sides of things.”

Vincent was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in suburban Sunnyvale, Calif., the son of a 1950’s stay-at-home mom and a dad who worked for the United States General Accounting Office. He loved language from an early age, and in 1979 he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in English and a dream of becoming the next Jack Kerouac. Eager for his own On the Road experience, he hitchhiked his way to New York City in 1980, where he embarked on an appropriately Kerouacian career as a waiter, security guard at the Metropolitan Museum and fearless New York City cab driver.

Two years after arriving in the city, Vincent met his future wife in the lobby of a movie theater where they’d both gone to see the Mel Gibson film Road Warrior. Over 20 years later, Ms. ­Ramaci-Vincent can still recite the date as if it were a favorite poem: Oct. 10, 1982. Back then, she was living a homesteader’s life in an East Village squat; less than a year later, he had moved, becoming her partner in everything from films to travel to “conservative Jacksonian” politics.

“When people used to talk about us, they used to say ‘Steve and Lisa,’” Ms. Ramaci-Vincent recalled. “It was always both of us, because the things he was interested in, I was interested in, and vice versa—although he liked gin martinis a hell of a lot more than I did.”

By 1990, the two had settled into a cozy East Village life together, and Vincent had begun making the transition from jack-of-all-trades to art-world journo. He was a dogged reporter, and he climbed the glossy rungs of this world quickly, but friends said he was also restless, anxious for something transcendent. For a time, he found it in the kaleidoscopic funhouse of the downtown fetish scene, where he often served as a “gentleman escort” for his friend the Baroness, a ruby-haired latex dominatrix. But after several years, that lost its intrigue as well.

“I would say he was looking for something to immerse himself completely and wholly from the day I met him,” said the artist Inka Essenhigh, who got to know Vincent while he was covering the art beat in the late 1990’s. “I think he was just looking for passion.”

And then, in 2003, the war began.

Vincent was initially drawn to Iraq in September 2003, during the early pre-insurgent calm that initially followed the U.S. invasion. A gung-ho supporter of the war, he chose to go because he was too old to enlist in the Army but still wanted to participate in what he called “the greatest event of [his] lifetime”: the war against “Islamofascism.” Or so he wrote in In the Red Zone, the book he published after his first two visits to Iraq.

The fight against “Islamofascism” was Vincent’s rallying cry. In the months after 9/11, he had boned up on Islam, and before long he’d developed a theory about Iraq as the “key” to a democratic revolution in the Middle East. It didn’t seem to matter to him that Islamic fundamentalism wasn’t much of a force in prewar Iraq, and he didn’t seem to care that most of his East Village neighbors were busy marching against the invasion. Vincent had often been the resident outsider, and frankly he kind of liked it, friends said.

“I cared little about ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ less about Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein,” he wrote in the opening chapter of In the Red Zone. “No, I envisioned the liberation of that country as a way to cure the Arab stagnation that had increasingly begun to infect the world.”

This theory didn’t survive completely intact under the harsh glare of the Iraqi sun. While Vincent remained staunchly pro-war until his death, he was disappointed by the failure of the reality of the U.S. invasion to live up to the dream. Particularly during his final stint in Basra, the notion that the city was being transformed under his eyes into a strict religious theocracy weighed heavily on him.

“He really wanted to call attention to the fact that, with the British looking on, Basra would become a fascist city,” said his wife.

But these realizations unfolded gradually. During his first one or two visits, Vincent was rather love-struck by certain aspects of Iraqi culture, several friends said. With characteristic zeal, he adopted Arabic idioms in his writing, collected Shiite posters, and even sported an abiya and kheffiya for a time—until, that is, he was pulled over one day by suspicious officers in Basra (the outfit, he was told, made him look like a Wahhabi terrorist).

“The volume was really turned up to 10 on basically everything about Shia culture, and he really responded to that,” Mr. Mumford recalled. “He had this deep fascination, love and envy of people who had an absolutely clear faith, even if it was absolutist in nature.”

But of all the Iraqis he befriended, Vincent reserved particularly strong feelings for his translator, Ms. Tuaiz. The two had met at a Basra Writers’ Union meeting during his second trip to the country, and she quickly became his guide through Basran society, the sidekick who accompanied him on all of his adventures and frequently appeared in his blog posts under the pseudonym Layla. In the chapter Vincent devoted to her in his book, he described her as “charming, extroverted, English-speaking, candid,” and declared, “I would do anything to help this woman.”

At 31 years old, Ms. Tuaiz made for an understandably compelling character. She’d been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein (allegedly for writing a satirical poem), beaten by her brothers, and subjected to all the injustices of being a woman in a strict patriarchy—and yet she trudged on.

“Steve embodied all of Iraq in Nour; he felt that she is the future of Iraq that could solve the problems of the Middle East,” Mr. Mumford explained. “But I think he was also moved on a very personal level by Nour …. He had this very gallant, kind of old-fashioned notion of chivalry; he wanted to save her.”

But for all these noble notions, Vincent’s open friendship with Ms. Tuaiz may have proved naïve, or even dangerous, in the social tinderbox of present-day Basra. As Vincent had himself documented, Iraq’s second-largest city was becoming an increasingly religious place, another militant Shiite outpost where gender relations were strictly policed. Men and women simply didn’t carry on public friendships. And while Ms. Ramaci-Vincent maintained that the relationship between her husband and his translator was strictly platonic, the mere suggestion of something deeper between an unmarried Iraqi woman and a Western man could prove deadly.

Vincent no doubt knew this all too well. But, as friends recalled, he was also a great admirer of larger-than-life figures like Lawrence of Arabia.

“The whole thing about the knight in shining armor—that was Steven. He just had this sort of noble thing,” Ms. Roselli said. “He was probably the most interesting man I had ever met. There’s nobody else like him. He’s going to be terribly missed.”

At the time, however, it was not without interest.

"They stabbed him with knives; they stepped on him," recounted Fouad Hassan, 19. It was about 20 minutes after a bomb-bearing Mercedes had exploded into a fireball and taken flight around the corner, right outside the spit-and-polished month-old Boraq Hotel. ("The car became a plane," the hotel's owner, who saw it through his shattering-glass façade, later recalled.) Thus, it was about 19 minutes after a spontaneously generated crowd seized one of the two men it believed to be the culprits and began what bystanders described as a frenzy of kicking, stabbing and chanting.

The chant ("By our blood, by our souls, we will sacrifice for you, Hosain!") had been written in praise of a Shia martyr, but was often raised-as it was here-in fist-thrusting defiance. Seeing this from about half a block away, I vaguely wondered whom the young men were yelling at, as the British soldiers had yet to arrive, and what, if anything, they were jumping on.

By the bystanders' estimation, it took approximately five minutes for the apparent terrorist to be apparently slain: "He was on the ground, bleeding from everywhere," said Fouad, a student in a nearby commercial college. As if to verify this account, another young man broke in to call a pair of American reporters "traitors" and to turn proudly outward an ankle speckled red. It was, he boasted, the blood of the murdered murderer.

Despite its detonation outside the hotel, the bomb was assumed by everyone to have been meant for the British convoy that regularly skimmed down Al Istiklal (Independence) Street.

Later, the British Army confirmed only that the crowd had killed a man, without divulging how. Although I saw no reason to doubt the stabbing-and-kicking scenario, the eyes of some witnesses did seem improbably sharp.

"They didn't seem scared," Assad Jabar, 26, a cashier in a nearby restaurant, offered of the crowd's two suspects. "They seemed determined to do this thing." Upon reflection, the blood on the defiant one's ankle could have gotten there in a disturbing variety of ways-not that this came as much of a comfort. After all, in happy countries, it is the custom of blood-stained youths retreating from murder scenes to disassociate themselves from the act.

In any event, many things were definitely true. It was definitely true that the blast sounded, as blasts sometimes do, more like an enormous thud: a herd of elephants dropping dead, God's bedroom set falling to earth. It was definitely true that it instantly changed Basra's channel from the regularly scheduled program of winding down for the weekend to a film-at-11 montage of smoke and sirens and hordes of people oddly eager to get close to rather than far from the scene, among them more than a few kids on banana-seat bicycles, pedaling toward trouble as if it were a Good Humor truck. (The man scrubbing the sidewalk in front of the Jundian Hotel continued, however, to make his circles of suds, exactly as before.)

It was definitely true that those assembled paid genuine, if ultimately mistaken, homage to the classic terrorist one-two punch of setting off one bomb to attract a crowd, and a second, larger bomb to slaughter it: Within 15 minutes of the initial blast, a rising murmur of "Car bomb! Car bomb!" swept over the crowd and made it charge, if just for a minute. It was definitely true that the people who set the bomb were not universally viewed as the only ones responsible for the bomb.

"The problem is between America and Al Qaeda!" screamed Hamad Maharous, 29. "It has nothing to do with the Iraqi people! Why did you bring this to us? In Saddam's period, they wouldn't dare to come to Iraq!"

Uttered in a Shia bastion that had sparked an uprising against Saddam Hussein almost exactly 13 years before, and that had rejoiced in his ouster almost exactly one year before, Hamad's last remark hit a nerve. More importantly, though, it touched upon a truth about who is killing and being killed in Iraq in these killing-filled days. As anyone who looks can plainly see, it is mostly Iraqis who are dying in attacks aimed at foreigners. But it is not only in attacks aimed at foreigners that Iraqis are dying. Iraqis themselves are targeted by plain old criminals motivated by plain old greed-albeit plain old greed that has achieved a whole new level of dementia. (In Baghdad, I have a friend who has a friend who was kidnapped. His family gathered up a fat ransom and secured his release. A few weeks later, the same man was kidnapped by the same gang. Only the ransom demand, having increased, had changed.) And, especially in places like Basra, Iraqis are targeted because they are Shia, coalition-friendly or not.

It was his long beard, "scary face" and dark dishdasha that doomed the man in the eyes of the crowd after Thursday's bombing, for these traits commonly mark the Wahabbi, and in a place like Basra at a time like the bombing, a Wahabbi is the last thing one could wish to be. Wahabbis are members of the extreme sect of Sunni Islam that rules in Saudi Arabia and, at its most perverse, fuels terrorist acts in New York and Madrid-and Basra, for its contempt for the West is perhaps matched only by its contempt for Shia Islam. Ever since the war, Shia communities have been whispering, murmuring and at times screaming about what they perceive as the infiltration of their areas by Wahabbis bent on destroying them.

Sometimes, as in the Al Asma'ayah section of Basra last week, such perceptions seem chillingly fair.

Rumor had it that there had been recent bomb threats against a school and a health clinic, neither of them particularly beneficiaries, let alone creatures, of the U.S.-led coalition. The rumors turned out to be false. At the July 14 Primary Health Care Center, Soad Hameed, a Liverpool-trained doctor, said that no, the threat had been directed only at the school. She said this so calmly that one would think that the school was in another province, rather than a few doors down.

As is often the case in Iraq, the school was actually two schools, divided into two shifts: Noor Al Hosain Intermediate came in the morning, and Al Forsan Secondary came in the afternoon. Here, too, the staff declared, there had never been a bomb threat.

There had simply been the bomb itself.

The bomb, which had been discovered about two weeks before, had been hand-made. It appeared to be a plastic brick wrapped in yellow, with two wires connected to it. It was placed on the inside window sill of a storage room that looked out on a playground that was, when I visited, full of boys playing soccer. Presumably planted during the midday change between the two schools' shifts, the bomb was found by a 16-year-old boy. The school alerted the British, who came with one of their robots to dispose of it. It was not, the headmaster and some teachers concurred, a time bomb, nor a remote-controlled bomb, but the kind of bomb that would be activated by activity. Out on the playground, a teacher opened and shut the window in question by way of showing me how. Had, say, a boy kicked a soccer ball into the window, it would have blown up.

"It's a problem between Wahabbi and Shia," said Satttar Hashim Hamoud Al-Jazalani, a 50-year-old clothing seller. "It's not because of the British."

It was about an hour after Thursday's car bomb. Sattar was standing on a second-floor balcony of his apartment building, across the street and up a bit from the corpse of the Mercedes. He had been standing outside when two reporters asked to enter the building so as to get a wide-angle view of the aftermath from the roof. Although he could easily have been forgiven for refusing, he agreed with a congeniality that was, under the circumstances, almost jarring.

"This is my home!" he exhaled, in English, leading up the staircase to his apartment. "Welcome, relax!"

Behind the apartment's half-open door, Sattar's black-swathed daughter could be seen urgently pouring a glass of water, as if disaster would strike should visitors cross the threshold without receiving instant refreshment.

As it happened, the visitors did not cross Sattar's threshold, but that of his next-door neighbors, who had the balcony onto the street. By now, the street had gone from a boil to a simmer, and seemed to be trying to make up its mind whether to go back to a boil again. About 20 British Defender vehicles dotted the block in front of the Boraq Hotel, and red tape had been put up around the scene of the crime. As if on cue, angry young men had begun to hoot and throw stones, and the soldiers had started firing warning shots.

The phrase "Northern Ireland" is often invoked here by way of admiring shorthand for the British military's un-American cool in dealing with civilian occupation. Right then, however, the phrase came not 100 percent happily to mind.

Sattar's neighbors invited the reporters to sit down and sit out whatever nastiness might develop below. On their living-room wall hung a rendering of the Last Supper in Technicolor needlepoint.

"They are Christian, we are Muslim," Sattar purred, as if to soothe, or say grace. "You are at home."