As Gen. David Petraeus Reports to Congress, a Reality Check from Baghdad's Troubled Neighborhoods

Iraqi men look at a bullet-riddled wall following an alleged raid by US forces into Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City.

On the border between the Shiite and Sunni sections of Ghazaliyah, two guards, Abdul Kareem and Hussein Ahmed, stand—or, rather, slouch—outside their Sunni mosque. The facade is pockmarked with bullet holes. Shiite homes now surround the holy site. The two men gripe to a group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division on a foot patrol. "The new people here still spit at my face when they walk by, but they've stopped shooting at us," says Kareem with a smile, gesturing to bullet holes near the gate.

As they are talking, a local Shiite man approaches the patrol with his 8-year-old young daughter. Her back and right arm are horribly scarred and blistered after she dropped a pan of boiling cooking water on herself the day before. "We don't go to the clinic," says the father, gesturing up the road to where the neighborhood becomes Sunni, "because we will not get care." The two guards are stonily silent as the Army medic tells the father to go to the nearby combat outpost for emergency treatment.

Sunnis often complain that the central government favors Shiite neighborhoods, providing more services there. While that might be true in some cases, no one has been spared the ill effects of the war. The city's shattered infrastructure and essential services have themselves become instruments of sectarian conflict. In Aamel, Shiites blame Sunni insurgents for targeting power lines that feed the city. In Dora, the streets are still so dangerous that the Red Crescent has no presence, and the government doesn't fund local Sunni clinics. In Ghazaliyah, the enclave of Sunnis complains that the Shiites in other parts of town have turned up the pressure of the water system, destroying the underground pipes and flooding potable water into the lakes of raw sewage that dot both sections of the neighborhood.

For American soldiers tasked with policing the fragile cease-fire, a decline in violence is both a blessing and a bore. Attention to discipline, as any officer knows, always increases as the fighting declines, which means soldiers—some on their third or fourth tours—are pestered about small imperfections in their uniforms or proper handling of their weapons.

But sometimes the endless hours of uneventful patrolling can lead to mischief. Driving slowly for hours on end through the newly reopened and crowded Dora market, American soldiers rig the windshield washer on their armored humvee as a water gun to spray pedestrians. The young soldiers—despite knowing how a small incident can turn ugly fast—find it funny to spray unsuspecting Iraqis. Young boys seem to get the joke and smile. But when the soldiers spray a series of veiled women, old men, and chickpea vendors, the joke gets old fast. "We should stop—it looks like the masses are starting to get angry," says the humvee driver, glancing around and moving his hand off the plunger button on the dashboard.

Not far from the market, Abdullah Hassan and his father sit in their house talking about the past few years. They can now walk to work at the power plant, but the family still gets only an hour of power per day for their efforts. Abdullah watches Arabic music videos whenever there's enough juice to run the television. A year ago, their yard and the fruit and soda stand sat in the crossfire between a Sunni sniper's nest and an Iraqi Army checkpoint. The family didn't use the front door for more than a year. The sniper is still around but lying low and getting paid $350 per month to stand guard at a checkpoint as a member of a local "Awakening" movement militia. "We are all living between the terrorists," says Abdul Kareem, a former Iraqi Army officer who now works on a neighborhood reconciliation committee. "We can't just walk by, pretend they don't exist, and not say hello."

And outside his command center in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Pat Frank, commander of the 1-28, posted a hand-lettered motivational sign: "When historians write about American actions in Iraq," it reads, "they will focus on the 2003 invasion and the surge—you are part of history—your victory will be recorded." That might be so, but when Iraqi historians write about the past five years, they will doubtlessly focus on the full five years that have plunged their country so far into the abyss.