"I have a shop, but it's dangerous to open it," said Adnan Ahmed, 43, squatting on a patch of Jumhuriya street and hawking a few emergency lamps and other electrical equipment.

"If I get robbed, losses will be minimal," he explained.

The commercial neighborhoods of this city of five million people still look like battlefields, prowled by men wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Shops are closed, banks are looted and public buildings still smoldering wrecks.

Looters, some of them children, scavenge the Central Bank, searching the rubble for valid banknotes. The same scene is played out in branch offices of the two state owned banks, Rashid and Rafidain.

"We had 3.5 billion dinars (some one million dollars) in the safe, all are gone, together with the equipment, the furniture, everything," said Nadia Abdul Sattar, manager of Rafidain Bank's branch in the middle-class district of Bab Moazzam.

"There were calls from the mosques to go back to work; I'm ready, but where are the desks, the computers, the safes? Where is the electricity? And where are the policemen to guard us," she added.

The good news is that she has kept the branch's records on floppies, under instructions issued before the war by the bank's administration.

"When the bank reopens, we will be ready," she said, adding that almost all the clients had withdrawn large amounts of cash in anticipation of the war.

A few shops were open, many of them bakeries, protected by the simple queuing of people for bread.

"There is enough flour to last for a week, and then, it's all up to God," said Helmi Ismail, a 42-year-old baker on Rasheed Street.

One open pharmacy said it had no more medicine for chronic diseases and few antibiotics left.

Iraqis are no strangers to hard times; even before the war 60 percent of the 24.5 million people were living on support procured under the UN-supervised "oil for food" programme.

Before the US-led invasion on March 20, the government of Saddam Hussein announced it had distributed food rations to the population to last three months,

But security has now become at least as important as food, with widespread looting, vandalism and violence breaking out in the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam's feared security services and police.

"There are times when I regret his (Saddam) days, tell this to the Americans," said Majed Hameed Suleiman, one of the army of money traders and cigarette vendors working the sidewalk market of Kifah street.

"There is no authority, no reference, no one to whom we can complain," the money trader said.

"We live on small margins, we have to work everyday," said Alaa Dalumi, a 37-year-old father of four who earns 10,000 dinars (less than three dollars) a day from the sale of cheap local cigarettes.

The big traders in this market have closed shop and hired people to hawk their products on the street.

The money changers are more discreet and do not display bunches of bills like before. They agree on a price with the client, disappear for a while and then come back with the money.

The comatose state of the economy has had one benefit though -- it drove the dollar down.

"There is no trade, no imports, no travelling abroad and therefore no demand for the dollar," said a trader. One buyer said looters had stolen million of dollars from the central bank, boosting the circulation of hard currency on the street, but this could not be confirmed.

The local currency slipped from 2,500 dinars per greenback before the war to as much as 4,500 dinars during the fighting, before rallying back to 3,500 dinars after the fall of Baghdad on April 9.

SPACE.WIRE