At one point, he found himself sitting in an outdoor teahouse in Sadr City, a dilapidated Baghdad neighbourhood of 2.5 million Shias overrun by raw sewage and nightly gun battles between Shia militiamen and the US Army. He was having an awkward chat with a whiskey-guzzling crime kingpin who might have been able to shed light on Mayada's fate.

'What if the police come now?' Mr Farho recalled asking the criminal overlord, 'They'll arrest me, too.'

The mobster laughed heartily. 'Before the police even left the station,' he told Mr Farho, 'I would get a call on my cell phone.'

A few weeks later - after he had paid off a US$10,000 ransom, collected his distraught niece and begun selling off the entire extended family's property - he was headed to Syria, one of the many places Iraqis are going to get out of their country.'

'There's no place for us in Iraq,' Mr Farho said.

'Even if I wound up in a poor country in Africa, I'd be happy, as long as I could sleep at night without fear.'

Kanan Makiya, a scholar and Iraqi exile, wrote a book some years ago branding Saddam Hussein's Iraq 'The Republic of Fear', a place where the deposed president's security apparatus wrought havoc on the lives and psyches of ordinary Iraqis.

Today, a new kind of fear ravages Iraq, a fear that the growing insecurity will only get worse, that the violence, the hatred, the chaos will keep edging closer and closer to one's own life, one's immediate circle.

Fear is the common denominator, the only thing the disparate groups in Iraq have in common.

Violence, crime and mayhem have turned the capital into a constant carnival of unrealities and bizarre incidents. A simple trip to the supermarket turns into a disaster when a gunfight erupts outside. A wealthy doctor drives around in a beat-up jalopy while keeping his two Mercedes on cinderblocks, for fear he'll be carjacked.

An Iraqi teenager wearing an AC Milan hat frowns at an American soldier in a guard post. The soldier, a burly African-American with an M-16 in hand, stares back, stone-faced.

Once busy commercial streets crammed with cars and consumers are ghost towns. Once free-flowing highways turn into parking lots as roadblocks and checkpoints and military operations halt traffic and hamper life.

Car bomb explosions and mortar fire shake the day and night, so mundane now that some people don't even halt their sentences when the explosions go off.

Shop owners who used to welcome foreign reporters with tea, now politely but firmly order them out. 'I'm sorry, it's not you,' one cell phone shop owner explains. 'I'm just scared someone will target my store because they see foreigners here.'

The fruits of liberation - unrestricted political expression, freedom of travel, uncensored access to media - have become poisoned by the harsh, bloody realities of post-war Iraq, where there are now more than one car bomb explosion a day and terrorists, kidnappers, criminals, soldiers and spies scar the lives of Iraqis.

The trauma Iraqis are undergoing is palpable during a visit to the Bab al Sharji 'thieves market', a sprawling bazaar in the old section of town filled with pickpockets, car thieves and prostitution. At one stall, 13-year-old Allawi Ali Haydar sells videos showing footage of guerillas fighting American forces and the Iraqi National Guard.

In the bloody videos, the Mahdi Army militiamen open fire on Americans from alleyways and fire rocket-propelled grenades across outdoor markets in Sadr City. They sell briskly.

'I don't feel good when I see them,' said the boy, the sadness flickering in his brown eyes. 'I live in Sadr City and most of the events shown are in Sadr City, and I don't want such things to happen in my part of town.'

A crowd gathers and my driver and translator whisk me away. 'We have to keep moving,' my driver said. 'We'll be safer if we keep moving.'

Another day, another quick getaway from an interview.

This time I am bundled into the back of the car after an interview with soldiers at an army base when the fear creeps up on me. The paranoia settles in, as it does at every turn in Iraq. What if someone is following us, or has turned us in to the resistance?

What if one of the translators or guards sells me out for a few hundred or thousand bucks?

I think of poor Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, the two French reporters kidnapped on the road to Najaf. I last saw Christian at a cafe in Paris. He was pondering whether to come back to Iraq.

Georges was at my wedding in July. He had been talking about hanging up his foreign correspondent spurs and settling down back home with his new girlfriend.

They've now been missing for 40 days. My heart races. I order my driver to move, quickly. A series of car bombs has gone off nearby, and while I don't rush to the scene of every explosion in the city, this one is newsworthy: the radio says dozens of kids were killed.

But the road is blocked, yet again. We try to find a way past, but are thwarted at every stop. We are in the south of Baghdad, an area I'm not familiar with.

Piles of garbage rot on the streets. The Iraqi drivers lean on their horns and climb onto the median. 'Yes, yes, Moqtada,' says the graffiti. 'Iraq will be America's graveyard.' A Kiowa armed surveillance helicopter flies low over ahead. And then another one.

Across the median, an American Humvee convoy is stopped dead in its tracks. Up ahead is a clogged intersection. Behind is a huge wave of traffic keeping its distance. The drivers are too terrified to get close to the American convoy, the Americans too scared to get close to the intersection. Some of the Iraqis try to back out. Some try to push forward. No one gives anyone the right of away. Thus there is gridlock.

I have learned to fear the Arab word hadasseh. It means literally accident or incident, but in Baghdad's current context it usually involves explosives and rapidly moving projectiles. I realise we're stuck very close to the American convoy. If there's going to be a hadasseh, it will be right in our faces.

'Let's get out of here,' I said. The side street is blocked. So is the next one. And the next. Finally we find a way out, winding our way through a labyrinth of concrete pylons and razor wire. I breathe a sigh of relief. We have to keep moving. We'll be safer if we keep moving.

My driver tells me the story of his cousin: Stuck in traffic a week earlier, he was carjacked at gun point. He calmly handed the criminals the keys to his Toyota, stepped out of the car, grabbed a taxi and went home, where he broke down in tears and vowed to kill himself. His relatives intervened, took up a collection and agreed to buy him a Kia Civia.

Two days later the cousin was stuck in traffic again when a roadside bomb directed at a passing American convoy exploded. The Americans opened fire, he said, and pandemonium ensued. Cars screeched away ramming into each other. He threw the Korean-made Kia Civia into reverse and tried to get away. He was terrified something bad would happen to him or his car. By the time he got home he was again mired in despair.

'We're pretty confident things will get back to normal,' said Shamil, my translator, as we get back into the car. 'The question is what level of suffering we'll have to endure before things go back to normal.'

We turn on Radio Sawa, the popular US-backed radio station that has become the soundtrack to my life in Baghdad. My translator deciphers the headlines: Sunni clerics abducted and murdered in Sadr City, three Kurdish peshmerga beheaded, intense fighting on Haifa Street, new Abu Musab al-Zarqawi communique promising more violence against collaborators.

This is my eighth trip to Iraq since 2002 on stays lasting from two weeks to four months. I first visited Iraq's Kurdish north, which actively supported the war. Their view of the war as a liberation of Iraq was infectious, and when the northern front fell, I followed the Kurdish militiamen into cities where locals embraced us with flowers, hugs and sweets.

Back then, everyone - journalists, Iraqis, Americans - at least half-believed that Iraq was on its way to freedom and prosperity.

As the months wore on and the mismanagement, beheadings, kidnappings, car bombs, prisoner abuse scandals, gunfights and air strikes mounted, the true believers became fewer and fewer.

Now, only a dwindling cadre of US officials - ensconced behind the high walls and multiple security layers of the Green Zone - continue to publicly express unbridled optimism for the future of Iraq and America's aims. Even most of them are just trying to keep themselves alive and contain the burgeoning chaos until they have a chance to get out.

The most honest officials of the interim government acknowledge Iraq's deep troubles but call them growing pains, a stage countries undergo as they move from one government to another. They argue there's light at the end of the tunnel.

'We believe this is natural as a result of the collapse of the regime,' said Hamid al-Bayati, the deputy foreign minister.

'When a dictatorial regime with 13 security organisations, with a huge army of a half million or more collapses and the arms go into the hands of gangs, criminals and thieves, this is the obvious result.'

One friend who lives and works in the Green Zone recently had me over to her house for lunch. An Iraqi-American, she arrived here in the summer last year to get in touch with her roots and rebuild the country's political infrastructure.

Tears welling in her eyes, she said she's leaving this weekend for good, convinced she can do neither.

She says she'll try doing good somewhere else. Maybe Indonesia.