IN A makeshift mosque in a run-down Detroit suburb, scores of Arabs kneel on traditional carpets. But they are praying for war, not peace.

“War is indescribable, beyond imagination. But believe me, Saddam is worse,” says Baker Albaaj, a 37-year-old biologist who helps to run the small Islamic centre, hidden in a low-ceilinged brick building that used to be a dance hall.

Elsewhere in America, support for military action to remove President Saddam Hussein is, at best, equivocal, but here among the 25,000 Iraqi Shia Muslims who live in exile in Dearborn, a suburb of the decaying birthplace of the mass-produced motor car, it is resoundingly high.

The Karbalaa Islamic Education Centre, where the men pray, can be found on a long street of small, brick bakeries, grocery stores and petrol stations. Many of the signs are in Arabic, a testament to the tens of thousands of Arabs who have made a home here. Nestling alongside the highway that brings traffic speeding to Detroit past the shopping malls, shiny hotels and business centres of urban America, Dearborn is home to 98,000 people and 80 different nationalities, cultures or ethnicities including Irish, Polish and Latin American. There are five mosques.

Almost everyone seems to have a tale about the evils of Saddam’s regime. Mr Albaaj was imprisoned and beaten repeatedly from the age of 17 for refusing to join the Iraqi leader’s Baath Party. Sentenced to death, he was freed in an amnesty after the 1991 Gulf War.

Ali Fazin, a 52-year-old agricultural engineer who now works as a petrol station cashier, fiddles nervously with his black prayer beads as he describes how his elder brother was taken away one night in September 1981 and hanged for no reason. He had to pay $200 to collect the body six months later.

“No crying. No Koran,” were his instructions at the prison, where he says that he saw hundreds of bodies stacked like library books. Others at the centre tell of being tortured, of friends and family members killed one by one.

Sayeed Ali Ibrahim, a towering imam in black turban and flowing robes, describes being suspended from a ceiling fan by a cord under his armpits and spun around while prison guards beat him until his collarbone broke and a bone in his pelvis fractured.

Ahmed Aljeburi, 45, lost all five of his brothers. Two were hanged for participating in an uprising in 1991. The bodies of the other three have never been recovered. A primary school teacher, he recalls being laid on the ground in front of his pupils while torturers stamped on his right arm until it broke. He stretches out his arms to show that one is crooked and shorter than the other.

“In other countries, you are innocent until proven guilty; in Iraq, you are guilty until proven innocent and you get the torture in advance,” Mr Albaaj says as the imam chants in the prayer room.

These men are mostly members of Iraq’s Shia majority, which is oppressed and excluded from power by Saddam’s ruling Sunni group. Some came to Detroit years before the Gulf War, hoping to find work and safety. Thousands more poured in later, when hopes of bringing down his regime were shattered.

They have bitter memories of how President Bush Sr removed Saddam from Kuwait but left him in office and his opponents defenceless when they rose up and were mercilessly crushed.

Mr Albaaj describes the death of his 23-year-old friend, Nihad Hassan, in the failed uprising. “He was a teacher. He died in my arms. The Republican Army just blew the place up. I saw people being killed. I carried people killed. I carried people wounded. The allied army was just a couple of kilometres away.”

The men also fear the devastation that war will bring to their homeland and are concerned about America’s postwar plans. Last month they met Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary and a leading architect of war. They welcomed him with chants that Saddam must go, but also questioned him about US motives, plans to install a retired American general to run Iraq temporarily and whether this Bush Administration can be trusted.

But the second President Bush offers the first hope of ousting Saddam in more than a decade, and that overrides other worries.

Ali Fazin is willing war to come so he can return to the family that he left behind in 1986. He accuses the anti-war protesters who have taken to the world’s streets in recent weeks of being as uninformed as his Arab immigrant neighbours from other Middle Eastern countries, many of whom oppose war. “They don’t know what is happening in Iraq,” he says. “They don’t know how we live. People live very hard. No medicine. No food. People are tired.”

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