Given the choice, Rana al Asadi would not wear a head scarf. But a few weeks ago, the 22-year-old English major at Basra University decided she didn't have that choice anymore.
Menacing groups of men have been stopping cars at the university gates and haranguing women whose heads are uncovered, accusing them of violating Islamic law. Male students have accosted women as they walked to class. As al Asadi spoke to a reporter in a courtyard, a scruffy-looking man handed out flyers that likened uncovered women to prostitutes and murderers.
"I fear them," she said simply.
Shi'ite Muslim extremists, backed by armed militias, are waging a campaign of intimidation to enforce a strict Islamic code of conduct in Iraq's second largest city. Neither the Iraqi police nor the British forces occupying Basra seem willing or able to stop it.
While there are no known cases of women being attacked for not covering up, three alcohol vendors and two bystanders were gunned down in February, the latest in a string of such assaults. A few weeks ago, gunmen shot and killed a woman who ran a shop that sold videos.
There appears to be widespread sympathy, especially among men, for some of the religious militias' goals, underscoring the British dilemma. Several people expressed support for the killings of the alcohol dealers, for example, saying they were peddling their wares on a vice-infested street that became a public nuisance.
Effective extremism
In Basra, a port city near Kuwait and a Shi'ite stronghold of 1.4 million people once known for its nightclubs, it's now nearly impossible to buy an alcoholic drink. Head scarves are almost universal now at the university.
Basra, which gets far less attention from Western news media than Baghdad does, largely has been seen as a success, mainly because there have been far fewer attacks on the British troops who patrol there than on U.S. troops farther north.
But the effectiveness of religious extremists' campaign raises questions about whether freedoms of expression and religion -- newly enshrined in Iraq's interim constitution -- will survive in the Shi'ite-dominated south after the coalition returns authority to Iraqis this summer.
"We believe that we are the supreme legislative authority in Iraq, because our constitution is the holy Koran, and for us, the holy Koran is the supreme constitution," said Sheikh Abdul-Sattar al Bahadli, who runs the Basra office of hard-line Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
Al Bahadli said al-Sadr's organization performed charitable and community work in Basra. It also conducts armed patrols, he said. A few months ago, the group met with video merchants.
"We told them that Iraq is living under certain norms and tribal traditions. Before these meetings, there were violations of the Arab, Islamic morals. In particular, there were sexy films. And after these meetings, there was a positive response in the marketplace."
Video sellers say it wasn't gentle persuasion that made them stop selling risque films, but terror. In addition to the woman's killing, merchants have been kidnapped and beaten. Al Bahadli said he renounces such tactics.
No arrests have been made in the killings, and an Iraqi police official said none were forthcoming.
Many residents say the police and the British troops are ineffective, not only against religious militias, but against regular street crime. Killings, carjackings and kidnappings are on the rise, according to a deputy medical examiner who tracks the body count at the Basra morgue.
Criminal element
Crime is a problem throughout Iraq, but in a January poll by Baghdad's Institute for Civil Society Studies, 67 percent of Basra residents said they felt unsafe in their neighborhoods, compared with 48 percent in Baghdad.
The British army, which occupies Basra with about 8,200 soldiers, prefers to let the Iraqi police fight crime, although soldiers occasionally mount joint operations with the locals.
The British, steeped in colonial experience, have taken a hands-off approach to religious militias.
"We're not here to change the culture, and we're not here to create a utopia," said Maj. Tim Smith, a British army spokesman. "A lot of the problems that are happening here in society are as much for the Iraqis to sort out as well as us."
He and other British officials acknowledged that religious extremism is a problem in Basra, but he dismissed the charge that British forces are standing aside as militias run rampant.
In the months after major combat ended, Smith said, the British allowed the militias to take a lead role in security patrols, as part of their philosophy of rapidly empowering local authorities.
"That was a mistake. We're probably paying for it now," said Gareth Davies, the senior law-and-order adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority's southern office.
In two dozen interviews with Basra residents, nearly everyone said the British are too lax on crime gangs and militias. Many said the Iraqi police are often too scared -- or too sympathetic -- to fight them.
Smith said British forces were working to contain and disarm the militias. But it's a delicate issue. There's no insurgency to speak of in Basra, where Shi'ites were happy to see the end of deposed President Saddam Hussein's regime.
"It's something we have to be very pragmatic about and, of course, if we appear pragmatic, some people might look at it as being complacent," Smith said.
Another complication: Among the dozens of religious militias, some behave responsibly, residents and police officials say, while others are little more than criminal gangs.
The Badr Brigade, a large Iranian-backed militia, said last week that it was negotiating to integrate itself into the Iraqi security forces. But locals say smaller groups, some of them affiliated with fringe political parties, will be much harder to control.
"I'd like to see Iraq free of these people," said Nesreen Qassim, 20, a psychology major who was one of the few women on the Basra campus last week who weren't wearing head scarves. "I just want to tell them: 'Why are you imposing your views on others?'
"As for my security, I fear a lot."