The fighting has seen him trapped with two blind daughters in one room in the city centre since Wednesday morning, without water or electricity and with nothing to eat but beans. Hamed, a 55-year-old retired civil servant, is now growing desperate.

“Is this the new paradise that the Americans said they would give us when they invaded our country?” he asked. “When is this nightmare going to end?” The fighting in Haifa Street, one of the oldest parts of the city, was more than just another day’s violence in Baghdad.

Involving 1,000 American and Iraqi troops backed by Apache helicopters and F-18 fighter jets, it was one of the most spectacular military operations there since the American invasion in spring 2003. Flames and clouds of smoke filled the area as the battle against Sunni insurgents raged. Helicopters raked the rooftops with rocket and machinegun fire, jets swooped down almost to rooftop level, and tanks and fighting vehicles took up supporting positions as innocent people cowered inside.

When the fighting died down, Iraqi officials said at least 50 insurgents had been killed. During the lull Hamed ventured outdoors in search of food for his daughters. He immediately came across the bodies of three men. They were curled up. “I could have sworn they were sleeping at first,” he said. “Then I saw their blood-soaked clothes and their open eyes and I knew they were dead.”

Haifa Street is less than a mile from the green zone, which houses both the American command and the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. The area had been cleared of insurgents several times. Once the troops left they always drifted back and continued their sectarian killings.

In a televised address last week, Bush admitted tersely that there had not been “enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighbourhoods”. These “mistakes”, he insisted, had now been addressed. But sceptics say his change of tactics has come far too late.

Bush is in a desperate race to stabilise Iraq and preserve his legacy before Congress and the American public give up on the venture. Ominously the latest polls show that 66% of Americans oppose a surge in forces. The Iraqis are simply bracing for further bloodshed.

Under the Bush plan for “victory”, an extra 17,500 troops will be sent to Baghdad and another 4,000 to Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold to the west, bringing the American force back up to 150,000. The 82nd Airborne Division is on its way, and troop levels will build over three to four months.

Baghdad is to be carved into nine sectors, including Sadr City, a slum of 2m people where the black-robed Mahdi army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric, holds sway. In a radical departure from previous sweeps of the city, there will be 27 mini-bases, known as joint security stations. American troops will sleep and eat there alongside Iraqi forces.

“They can’t be commuters,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow on defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations who recently advised Bush on Iraq. “There is going to be a heavy emphasis on a high-density presence.”

In each sector of the city American troops will be joined by one Iraqi army brigade and the Iraqi police, giving a local face to the surge. The sectors will be “gated” — sealed off by checkpoints and roadblocks as well as existing barriers such as roads and rivers.

The aim is to force insurgents out of the secured zones, while residents will be issued with IDs and protected round the clock. The unemployed will be put to work in the hope of reducing the incentives for extremism as part of the third tier of the policy of “clear, hold and build”.

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