IN A city where virtually nothing works and where anyone in uniform is as likely to shoot you as to help you, Faiq Mahmoud still makes his daily postal round.

He must vary his route to outsmart kidnap gangs and sidestep the insurgents roaming his troubled neighbourhood of Aadhamiya in northern Baghdad but he insists that the gunmen will not stop his mail delivery getting through.

A short, slightly built figure, Mr Mahmoud has plodded down these streets for six years, although nowadays he regularly passes dismembered corpses and bombed-out cars. He is supposed to start at 8am but turns up much later. The suicide bombers usually do their worst in the morning. so he appears when he believes that it is safer.

His bosses at the Ministry of Communications are so desperate to keep the service operating that postmen have licence to work as they please. Nobody wants to sport the smart new outfits that replaced the brown overalls they wore during the time of Saddam Hussein.

“A uniform would make you a target,” Mr Mahmoud said. “The kidnappers go for any government employee, so we are in disguise.” He pointed to his striped T-shirt and scruffy jeans.

Yesterday Mr Mahmoud, 42, hid his prized moped in a friend’s house and set off on foot with a bundle of letters hidden in a blue carrier bag, ducking down alleyways, through gardens and tramping over rubbish dumps to avoid the risks of the main roads.

The Post Office turns a blind eye to any of its staff carrying a firearm, but this father of three prefers to go unarmed. “People know me around here so, if the shooting starts, I can duck into someone’s house,” he said with an anxious smile.

Residents smothered him with gratitude. One man burst into tears, kissing Mr Mahmoud on both cheeks and filling his pockets with sweets when he delivered a letter from abroad containing a visa that meant that the family would soon join the exodus.

“It does make me feel good when I see the happiness people get from receiving a letter in their hand,” he said. “It is also a reminder there is some sort of normality amid the madness of Baghdad.”

Much of his time is spent playing detective. So many people have fled the suburb — or have had their homes destroyed — that he must track down the person, not the address. He said: “I have my own intelligence service. I ask shopkeepers, street sellers, children — anyone. But I know this area better than the police.”

A friend and colleague, Saad Hameed, was recently killed by a bomb outside the post office, in Al-Amel, western Baghdad and there was a large explosion outside one of the city’s main post offices last week that killed a dozen bystanders. Safadin Badr, the Deputy Head of Post in the ministry, is reluctant to say how many of his staff had been killed.

The postal service was established in Iraq in 1874. Mr Badr cannot guarantee delivery times but he said that a letter can get from north to south in less than a week. Skirmishes in some districts of the capital mean that it can take a lot longer to deliver a mile across Baghdad.

Customers must drop their mail in makeshift collection centres in ministries or official buildings because the distinctive yellow post boxes have been vandalised. Mr Badr estimated that they are delivering slightly less than 200,000 letters a month. Postmen are paid £114 a month, about half the salary of a police recruit.

Mr Mahmoud has more than 3,000 properties on his route but yesterday, because he could not find some customers and because of a security scare when a US Army patrol opened fire, he managed to deliver only six letters.

He said: “I yearn for the good old days, when all a postman in Baghdad had to fear was someone’s mad dog.”

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