"I'd had enough of waiting in my house and seeing my city fall apart. So I've come to take the wheel again," said Taleb Khoder, a 35-year-old bus driver who plies the route between Baghdad and Diwaniya, 200 kilometresmiles) south of the capital.

"It's too much to see people waiting here like animals. We will not wait for a new government. There is no more bombing, the roads are safer, so let's go," he said.

His decision brought happiness to a swarm of men who fought to get on board the blue-and-white buses running for the first time in 10 days.

Most people wanted to rejoin family members who fled to the provinces at the start of the USled war on the regime of Saddam Hussein on March 20.

Mushtaq Hamid and Wissam Saadi had come every day since Thursday to see if they could leave.

"We walk kilometres to the bus station. And as there is neither bus nor taxi, we leave," said Hamid, who wanted to travel to Ramadi, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad.

"Before the war I sent my parents to Mosul, in the north. I stayed to protect the house," said Saadi.

"I have been without news from them since the end of March. There are no longer any telephones, so going there is the only way."

Khoder the bus driver packed his bus full.

The price of petrol has gone up and so the Baghdad-Diwaniya fare has shot up to 2,000 dinars (60 US cents) from 750.

On Baghdad's main Republican bridge, scene of clashes between US forces and Iraqi troops, city residents had cleared the road, dismantling the charred remains of cars used as barricades.

Volunteers were also out in the Iraqi capital undertaking the gruesome task of removing the bodies of people killed in fighting.

Corpses lay in cars in the middle of roads or littered the pavements after being caught up in firefights.

One volunteer told AFP his group, equipped with surgical masks, rubber gloves and aprons, had cleared 18 bodies from the streets during Sunday morning alone.

The remains are wrapped in white sheets and Iraqi flags, loaded on stretchers and taken to hospitals for identification before burial, a task also being carried out by volunteers.

"We have started. If we hadn't, nobody would have done anything," said one volunteer, Ali Ahmed Hamid. "We live here. We are doing all we can."

Elsewhere in the city, life is slowly resuming a degree of normalcy.

A barber again wields his scissors, grocers re-assemble stalls of tomatoes and onions, long queues snake from busy bakeries. Looting is becoming a less common sight.

Nevertheless, "self-defence committees" are more evident than ever, in the absence of the police, which disappeared with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

In an opulent "officers barracks", tribal leader Adnan Abud explained: "We formed a committee to defend ourselves. We have weapons. Our groups share the blocks of houses out amongst them, do night patrols and roadchecks."

Like most areas in Baghdad, the streets are blocked with heaps of sand, lines of oil cans, paving stones or palm branches, forcing cars to slow down.

Residents are also starting to burn their growing buildup of rubbish.

SPACE.WIRE