Five years to the day after American troops ripped down a statue of Saddam Hussein on Paradise Square, the city was eerily quiet today with a ban on vehicle traffic designed to prevent attacks and stop anti-American demonstrations by hardline Shia groups.

Sadr City, the giant slum bastion of the Mahdi Army militia in the northeast of the capital, was largely still, although half a dozen Iraqis died in overnight clashes with encroaching US and Iraqi forces. They have ringed the area and are hunting down armed groups.

Five years ago, the remnants of Saddam’s Fedayeen paramilitaries were fighting the embryonic Mahdi Army in the area, then still known as Saddam City.

Recent clashes there have killed scores of people as the new Iraqi leadership ushered in after the US invasion tries to muster the strength to face down militias that sprang up in the security vacuum that followed the 2003 campaign to topple Saddam.

Curfews were also imposed in the mainly Sunni northern towns of Samarra and Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, to prevent demonstrations. The lockdown in Baghdad was designed to stop supporters of Hojetoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army’s unruly founder, from swarming hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to demonstrate against what they still see as a “US occupation.”

Most of Baghdad was quiet, however, with shops closed and people moving around on foot amid a heavy Iraqi security presence. Children played football in empty streets.

The US military said one of its troops died from “non-combat injuries,” a term usually used to describe accidental shootings, suicides or work accidents. The death brought the US military toll to 4,025 killed in five years of a war that still has no clear end in sight. At least 90,000 Iraqi civilians are believed to have died.

The UN refugee agency said on the anniversary that in addition to the more than two million Iraqis living in exile, another 2.77 million were listed as internally displaced persons, or IDPs, forced from their homes by warfare, ethnic cleansing and death squads.

The agency said: “According to the latest estimates, the number of IDPs in need of shelter and food is now tops a million. More than 1 million internally displaced people have no regular income, and some 300,000 have no access to clean water."

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