Democracy flourishes in the streets, but with a warning for Allies

For nearly 30 years, Ahmed Ismail Kalaluz lived in Baghdad as a "sleeper", a Kurdish undercover agent presenting himself to the outside world as an iron and wood trader. Yesterday he was working openly in his new office.

And he was savouring a special victory. On his desk, fresh from the presses, lay a copy of Al-Ittihad, the first newspaper printed in the Iraqi capital by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party for which – he now proudly admits – he is a local branch director.

If Saddam Hussein's men had found out about him a few weeks back – let alone seen the newspaper – he would have faced imprisonment and possible execution.

As he celebrated this moment, activists from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) – clerks, labourers, teachers, all of whom have spent years conducting their political activities in secret – were milling around outside one of the Baath party's many ugly concrete citadels. They have commandeered the building, smashed up the portraits of Saddam and decorated the walls with yellow flags and posters of their leader, Massoud Barzani. They, too, have come out into the open in the capital in the past few days.

Order is far from restored to the streets of American-occupied Baghdad. A few police cars and ambulances have begun to operate. Some shops have opened up, and volunteer citizens' groups have taken to directing the traffic, manning fire engines and guarding important installations such as the sewage works. But there is still shooting and the streets are dotted with makeshift barricades.

Yet an array of political parties have already begun setting up shop. In a four-mile drive through the city yesterday, we found six.

Baghdad's walls and public buildings have for decades bellowed forth the slogans and pictures of the Great Leader in various guises. Now they are being replaced by the scrawls and banners of organisations – some of them mysterious – that are eager to shape the new Iraq or to obtain a slice of power for themselves.

The two Kurdish parties – the PUK and KDP – say that between them they have at least 10 offices and thousands of workers in Baghdad, vying for the support of the city's one million Kurds.

Not long ago, Mr Barzani's portrait was plastered around the roundabout where the made-for-television toppling of Saddam's statue took place, only to be torn down soon afterwards.

A short drive away from Mr Kalaluz's premises stands the Iraqi Students Union, another former Baathist institution wreathed in smoke from the burning of yet another mountain of Saddam-era documents. A sign outside proclaims this to be a branch of the Free Officers and Citizens Movement. A would-be member called Amer, who introduced himself as a dissident Iraqi ex-intelligence agent returning from exile, told us that the party was principally for army officers. He said the leader is a former marshal in the Special Republican Guard, now living abroad, called Najib al-Salihi. Its banners have sprung up all over Baghdad and the surrounding areas in the past few days.

In the same six-storey building, Jenan Adel, a 25-year-old law student, was helping set up a branch of the Liberal Democrats – a nationalist group founded in the north of Iraq a decade ago and run by Mohammed al-Musawi, a prominent engineer.

And on a street corner elsewhere in Baghdad, Sattam al-Gaod – a wealthy California-educated businessman from one of Iraq's most prominent tribes – was holding forth amid a throng of men eager to find out more about his organisation, the National Front for Iraqi Intellectuals.

The first stirrings of party political activity in Baghdad are sure to be presented by the United States and Britain as a positive sign, a step along the extraordinarily difficult and unclear path to democracy. But the city's residents – like most in Iraq – appear wary, and are currently much more interested in the restoration of electricity and other basic services.

Suspicions abound that some of the lesser-known entities now emerging into the open are nothing more than fronts, created by dark forces that are vying for control of Iraq and trying, covertly, to manipulate Iraq's highly complex religious, ethnic and tribal politics.

A meeting chaired by the retired US general Jay Garner of selected Iraqi opposition parties in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Tuesday, was met with considerable scepticism, particularly from the country's Shia majority. And the Americans will not be impressed by the policies that most of the emerging political groups have in common, which have a distinctly nationalist and anti-American flavour.

Supporters interviewed yesterday – from Liberal Democrats to the National Front for Iraqi Intellectuals – emphasised that they wanted the new government to be chosen and run by Iraqis.

The Americans, they said, should leave as soon as order is restored – staying no longer than six months. This is a view that has taken strong hold here, fuelled by popular frustration over the length of time it has taken the occupying Americans to tackle the insecurity and dismal conditions, and anger over the mysteriously unchecked torching of museums and ministries.

But the roots are about Iraqi nationalism and run far deeper than this. Mr Gaod spelt out a view that is easily found on the occupied streets of post-Saddam Baghdad. "I want the Americans to understand clearly that Iraq is in a daze at the moment. But it will wake up eventually. And what happens then will be quite different," he said.