“He made life very difficult. First there were the terrible crackdowns. Then the police would harass us or, worse, steal our money,” she said as she watched out for customers. “Now we can do as we like.”

Among the new freedoms that have prospered since the collapse of the Baathist regime, pornography is sold openly, prostitution is no longer concealed and films that would have been previously censored or banned now run uncut in the cinemas.

On the main streets, prostitutes have flourished, although to the untrained eye they can be hard to spot. “It is not like the West, where they wear miniskirts and boots,” my guide said. “Here they often cover themselves in a black shawl like a religious woman, but have dyed blond hair and wear jeans under their robes.”

Marwa made little pretence about her profession. “I was badly injured by a bomb in the last Gulf War and my entire family was killed, so I had to make do with what I had,” she explained. “Others girls are in a similar position. Some have children and no income.”

There are still dangers. This week a brothel was attacked by looters, who raped the women and stole their money and jewellery. But little could be worse than Saddam’s crackdown on prostitution four years ago, after it emerged that Iraqi women were working in the Gulf, many of them forced to sell their bodies because of a decade of economic sanctions. Eager to cast himself as a devout Muslim and to win support from Islamic countries, Saddam ordered brutal methods to stop the problem.

Memories of that crackdown are still fresh in the minds of the residents of the Saddam Complex, a housing estate in the outskirts of Baghdad. “Our neighbour was a woman called Umm Zena,” Kamal Hassan recalled. “She used to throw parties all the time. Men would visit at all times of the day. We told her to stop and occasionally the police would intervene, but she carried on.”

Then, in December 2000, soldiers arrived and took her away, with her daughter. “A few days later men in black wearing masks returned at night and dumped her body outside the flat in a sugar sack. Her head had been cut off. They posted a sign outside the house, which read: ‘This is what happens to prostitutes in our country,’ ” he said.

While the brutality still haunts some, others want order to be restored. “Those girls deserve what happened to them,” Damia Mubarak, a housewife, said. “After Saddam, there is no police, no government, no security. Women are afraid of walking the streets for fear of being kidnapped. We need order to be restored.”

Some Muslim leaders are calling on the faithful to combat vice. Marwa’s freedom to work Baghdad’s streets may be shortlived.

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