BEFORE the war, Baghdad’s tree-lined Salhiyeh Street housed the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and was best known to diplomats and their drivers.

Yesterday it was reborn as the capital’s first experiment in multiparty democracy, with rival political groups seizing abandoned government buildings, establishing their headquarters and declaring themselves open for business.

The tree-lined street has been rechristened “acronym alley”, with party hacks from the PUK, the KDP, the INC and the ICP painting slogans on walls, putting up posters of their leaders and smiling with obvious satisfaction at the change in their political fortunes over the past month.

“I have been waiting for this day my whole life,” Mahmoud Kadir said as he parked his rusting Renault in front of a former Baath party building, now one of several “liberated” political offices for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). “As soon as I heard Saddam had fallen, I came here and claimed it for our party. Looters beat me to it, but we still have the building.”

Across the street the Iraqi National Congress (INC) secured the passport office and the burnt-out shell of the Foreign Ministry. The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) had to settle for an army recruiting office next door. The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) seized the flashy premises of the engineering office for presidential palaces, which looks more like a Las Vegas casino than a government building.

The property grab was timely. The political struggle between Iraq’s various fledgeling parties is as intense as anything in Westminster or Washington. Today scores of Iraqi political leaders will assemble at the city’s convention hall near by for an historic conference hosted by the Americans. Kurds, Sunni Arabs, communists, monarchists and even the main Shia Muslim group backed by Iran are expected to attend the gathering, which will be held under tight security.

Washington hopes that some of those present will form an interim Iraqi authority and, eventually, a fully fledged government. Fittingly, the assembly is taking place on Saddam Hussein’s birthday, a day previously devoted to praising the dictator.

In his first address to the Iraqi people yesterday, Jay Garner, the retired US Army general who heads the Pentagon’s civil administration in Iraq, insisted that Washington wanted only to rescue Iraq.

“I am here to help rebuild your country and to turn your government into one which serves you,” he said in a radio broadcast. “Over the next few days and the next few weeks you will see all services restored. Along with the military we are working to keep your streets safe and security continues to improve.”

Certainly services have improved and life in Baghdad is beginning to return to normal. Shops have reopened, many of them selling formerly illegal satellite television dishes, mobile phones and pornography on DVD. Restaurants are filling up. The biggest problem on the city’s streets now is the heavy traffic.

But the political battle to fill the vacuum left by the fall of Saddam’s regime remains potentially explosive.

Yesterday American troops arrested Mohammad Mohsen al-Zubaidi, the self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad, who was accused of “exercising authority that was not his”. For a week he had been posing as a legitimate leader and, in the absence of anyone else, managed to attract some support.

Of greater concern to General Garner are not the charlatans posing as authority, but the potentially powerful figures who are refusing to co-operate with the Americans. In Sadr City, the Shia Muslim slum of two million people, the streets are controlled by scores of gunmen loyal to various religious figures.

Other parties are also establishing military units. The INC, which is supported by the Pentagon, has around 2,000 fighters in Baghdad. They were attacked in two separate incidents on Saturday and Sunday, leaving a dozen injured.

For anyone who lived through the civil war in Lebanon, there are unmistakable parallels between anarchic Beirut, under the militias, and Baghdad today. For now, the power rests squarely with American forces, but a speedy and smooth transfer to a credible Iraqi leadership could be the biggest test of the entire US campaign in Iraq.

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