"I'm only trying to protect myself and the people here. If I don't do it who will?" asked the sheikh, clad in a black tunic outside his home as a dozen armed men surrounded him.

"We rely only on ourselves for our own defense," he said.

A Sunni Muslim, the sheikh is the top leader of the Dulaim, a tribe of four million people whose bastion is the town of Ramadi west of Baghdad.

When the US-led coalition launched war on March 20, Sheikh Ali headed to protect Hay Babel, a neighborhood near Saddam Hussein's now ravaged presidential palace that includes the houses of business leaders and regime officials -- including Tareq Aziz, deputy prime minister.

The houses of leading figures under Saddam were ransacked by angry mobs after US troops rolled into Baghdad on April 9 and Iraqi authority crumbled.

Three days ago, the tribal chief decided to impose law and order of his own, creating a mini-police force of 40 men, who have posted themselves around the 300-building neighborhood.

The militiamen, most of whom lacked any experience in security work, wear simple identification and have been left alone by US forces.

"When we find looters we put them inside empty houses for two days to teach them a lesson, and then we release them. We're not traitors to our community: We're not going to hand them over to the Americans," said the sheikh.

The sheikh, whose full name is Ali Hatam Abdul Razak Ali Suleiman, demanded that unless US forces brought back security to Iraq, they should pack up.

"They've destroyed Baghdad in the course of a week," he said.

"They did it for their own interests, not ours. Now it's best for us to solve our own problems. People miss the security they had under Saddam; they don't miss Saddam himself," he added.

"We will accept nothing that comes from the outside, including the United States," said the man who has never left Iraq.

"It's true that Saddam was an awful dictator, but at least he was an Iraqi and he took care of his people," said the sheikh, adding that Saddam had pledged to pay five million dinars (1,700 dollars) to the families of each person killed by US air strikes.

"The United States freed us from him but destroyed our civilization and killed our people. They've behaved themselves like terrorists," he said.

In the sheikh's yard, where a sleek BMW was parked, armed men came up to seek his advice on a wide range of issues: gasoline, how to use power generators and how to protect particular homes.

After US troops arrived in Baghdad, Sheikh Ali met in his house -- the windows shattered by bombing -- with three US officers.

"I showed them a few photographs of my great-grandfather with the British in Ramadi in 1919. I told them I don't want to endure that again," he said.

He told the US forces he would only cooperate "if the new government is truly democratic."

"The Americans want to put in Ahmad Chalabi," head of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress.

"They want to do as they did with Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. They don't understand that we won't accept him because he's lived so long out of Iraq and we don't know him."

SPACE.WIRE