IT WAS an impromptu football match on a makeshift pitch in a Shia area of Baghdad. Two bombs were apparently buried in the middle of the waste ground. When they exploded on Wednesday evening 16 young people, many of them children, were killed.

Ask ordinary Baghdadis about yesterday’s warnings of impending civil war from the British Ambassador and top US commanders and they snort with derision. Most will tell you that a civil war has been raging for months.

“Who says there will be a civil war?,” said Essir al-Obeidi laughingly, a Sunni who recently fled a Shia area in Doura, one of the more dangerous parts of Baghdad. “It’s here already. The civil war started ages ago but no one was talking about it.

“Every day a Shia area of Doura attacks a Sunni area, then the Sunnis mortar the Shia area in revenge. Shia militias set up fake checkpoints and stop and kill Sunnis. In less than an hour, the Sunnis will have done the same to Shias,” he said.

Kerim, a Shia, agrees. “This is a civil war,” he says without a moment’s hesitation. “Everyone knows that — the Government, the Murjayia (Shia clerical leaders), but nobody does anything about it.”

The 37-year-old labourer speaks with feeling: he and his family were chased out of Abu Ghraib, a Sunni suburb of Baghdad, two months ago after his brother was murdered by religious extremists. They are now living in the Shia district of Sadr City, part of a vast movement of new refugees that is dividing the capital along sectarian lines.

The sound of gunfire is a constant feature of life in Baghdad, and everyone knows someone who has been killed or driven from their homes. Last month alone, more than 1,000 civilians, 135 members of the security forces and 143 insurgents were killed, according to official figures. About 1,800 civilians were injured. Hundreds more simply vanished.

Yesterday at least a dozen people died when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded near market stalls in central Baghdad. Fourteen people were killed by gunmen at a checkpoint on the road to al-Kut, a town full of Shia refugees just south of the capital. Nine bodies were found floating in the Tigris river.

Baghdad’s mortuary is so full that it can no longer store unclaimed corpses for a month, as required by law, and has to dispose of them sooner. Attacks causing multiple civilian casualties have become so commonplace that only the worst make the news, and it has become almost impossible to keep track of them. The number of journalists killed covering Iraq’s descent into chaos hit 100 this week, making it the most dangerous conflict for the media since the Second World War.

The country is now so dangerous that American commanders are having to shift more goods by air into their heavily defended bases. “All battalion commanders try to minimise how often you have to go out,” said Major Doug A. LeVien, of the 548th Logistic Task Force.

Huge swaths of the population have been displaced. Since the bombing of a revered Shia mosque in Samarra in February, about 182,000 Iraqis have been claiming aid as internally displaced people, although the rations are woefully inadequate. In the ten final days of last month, 20,000 people fled their homes, according to the Ministry for Displaced People.

Those that can have left the country. An estimated 644,000 Iraqis were living in neighbouring Syria and Jordan by the end of last year, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. In total 889,000 Iraqis have moved abroad.

“What we fear is that people are leaving from mixed neighbourhoods,” said Muhammad Safu Muhammad, an official at the ministry. “Recently we have witnessed an attempt to eliminate such neighbourhoods, to turn them into closed areas either for Shias or Sunnis.”

The battle lines are blurred. It is not simply Sunnis against Shias. Within the communities there are power struggles between militias, criminal gangs and insurgents who kill US and British soldiers.

Anyone driving across the city runs a gauntlet of checkpoints, official and otherwise, and knows one wrong word could prove fatal. Nobody ventures out at night. Islamic hardliners kill anyone they judge is not complying with strict Sharia. Shia extremists even issued leaflets threatening death to any grocer displaying “phallic” cucumbers alongside “feminine” tomatoes.

While William Patey, the outgoing British Ambassador, said that the situation was not totally hopeless, the beleaguered Government has pinned its hopes on the fledgeling Iraqi Armed Forces that US and British commanders have trained to replace their own troops.

President Talabani said on Wednesday that Iraqi troops could — “God willing” — take over security details by the end of the year. But few here trust the Iraqi security forces. Between 30 and 40 people are kidnapped every day, according to US estimates, many of them herded off by men in uniforms who are either part of the security forces or collaborating with them.

Often, the security forces fight among themselves. Two weeks ago Iraqi special police commandos wounded and arrested a terrorist suspect in a Sunni mosque in Doura, took him to hospital and called in reinforcements to prevent his rescue. Sure enough, a group of armed men appeared within an hour to take him away. But when they arrived, they were wearing police uniforms. They were, in fact, the personal bodyguards of Tareq al-Hashemi, the Sunni Vice-President. A gunfight erupted in the emergency ward. The bodyguards killed a police commando before they were arrested.

Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, a senior member of Mr al-Hashemi’s Iraqi Islamic Party, said the man was a Sunni mosque guard, wounded by police “gangsters” loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

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