Baghdad, Iraq - A young Iraqi Shiite journalist was told by shopkeepers in her neighbourhood that "safirat" -- women who do not wear the Islamic headscarf -- would no longer be tolerated on the streets.
"I put on a hijab (headscarf), stopped walking alone in the neighbourhood, and a relative drives me from my home to the bus stop when I go to work," said the journalist, who lives in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Shaab, an area controlled by militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.
Outside the capital's fortress-like Green Zone complex, Islamic militancy is becoming a potent weapon of Sunni Arab rebels, Shiite militiamen and gangs on both sides in a sectarian turf war for control of the city's districts and neighbourhoods and their inhabitants.
The most basic form of intimidation is the increasing pressure Iraqis, especially women, are subjected to in order to adopt a conservative dress code.
In a speech Tuesday at the US embassy during a ceremony celebrating US Independence Day, President Jalal Talabani said his government needed America's help to confront its new enemies -- militant Muslims and criminal gangs.
US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told AFP that "sectarianism and terrorism, which may manifest itself in Islamism, are Iraq's greatest challenges".
Squeezed between militias and insurgents, many of the people interviewed for this article were too fearful to give their full names.
Mona, 37, wears the hijab and also an abaya, the head-to-toe black cloak, whenever she ventures out of her home in the central Rusafa district to her job inside the Green Zone.
She comes from a secular Sunni Arab family living in a mixed area that is also under the influence of Sadr's Mehdi Army.
"My sister was told point-blank to wear the abaya or else. I fear the day when women can no longer go outside," she said from inside the safety of the Green Zone, with her hair exposed and wearing jeans and a colourful shirt.
May, 32, a member of Iraq's increasingly besieged minority Christian community, lives in the eastern Karradah district.
Large parts of the area are under the influence of the Sadrists, with posters of revered Shiite imams and clerics displayed everywhere.
"No more tanks tops and jeans on the street," she said with a smile, pointing to her long-sleeved and loose-fitting dress.
In the almost entirely Sunni western neighbourhood of Amiriyah, one resident described an area virtually out of government control where masked gunmen roam the streets freely, enforcing their own Islamic moral code by evicting Shiites on grounds they were "enemies and nonbelievers" and prohibiting men from wearing shorts or tight jeans and barbers from trimming or shaving beards.
Adnan, 27, a Sunni Arab, recounted how his barber friend was abducted by gunmen and brutally beaten up for violating the rules in his neighbourhood of Qahira in the predominantly northern Sunni district of Adhamiyah.
"An ice seller was killed for arguing with gunmen who told him that his profession was un-Islamic," Adnan said.
While condemning such acts, he himself has sought solace in Islam during these difficult times.
"I stopped wearing shorts at home, and no more pop music. We tune in to Saudi Koranic and religious satellite channels," he said.
Baghdad, with a population of about six million, is divided into nine main districts which are broken down into 89 neighbourhoods.
Some districts such as Sadr City, to the north, are firmly Shiite while adjacent Adhamiyah and large parts of Mansur district in the west are becoming purely Sunni.
Residents speak of a campaign of intimidation by each side and street battles for control of mixed neighbourhoods.
After the dress codes, the appearance of "Sharia" courts that ostensibly settle disputes according to Islamic law is one of the main signs of the city's transformation.
Sadr's movement has offices all over Iraq and in many Baghdad neighbourhoods, each with its own Islamic court attached to it.
A Sunni Arab living in the mixed Palestine Street area on the southern edge of Sadr City recounted how his brother was recently kidnapped by militiamen in police uniform and "tried" before one of these courts.
"Shiite friends with contacts with the Mehdi Army intervened and we saved his life after he had been sentenced to death for being a 'terrorist'," he said.
In Mansur's Al-Andalus neighbourhood, a Sunni resident said he recently spent the night on watch with his rifle on his rooftop after the imam of their mosque warned everyone that they might be attacked by Shiite militiamen.
"Imams are the only people we trust now," he said as he pulled out a leaflet distributed in the area warning residents not to block alleyways with tree trunks or sandbags because "this was impeding the mujahedeen from carrying out their operations".
Iman Abdel Jabbar, a Shiite married to a Sunni, heads the Al-Rafidain women's rights association. She lives in an upscale Mansur neighbourhood opposite the once-prestigious Hunting Club.
Her local grocer was killed because he was Shiite and she received threats on her mobile telephone calling her an "immoral traitor" and warning that her daughter and two grandchildren would be killed if she did not stop her work.
Sectarian violence has surged in Iraq since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February unleashed a bloody wave of tit-for-tat sectarian killings and bombings.
"We meet with our Sunni colleagues here in the Green Zone, but outside you have real battles being waged in the name of each sect," senior Shiite MP Sheikh Jalaleddin al-Saghir said, summing up the situation.