He came here to fight the Americans, but now this Lebanese taxi driver is a prisoner of war kept by the people he vowed to defend.

"This is my 23rd day in Iraq," he said wearily at his makeshift jail of the Sayed Shabab Ahl al-Jamaa mosque in Baghdad's vast Shiite shantytown known until recently as Saddam City.

Samir, 31, left behind his wife and two children, aged six and five, after being inundated by "the pictures of Iraqi children wounded by American bombs shown on the Arab television channels."

"I only had one desire, to come and fight the Americans," said the bearded and stocky man, who appeared to be in good health and said he was well-treated by his captors.

Samir hails from the Hermel area of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, known as a stronghold of the Shiite militia Hezbollah. He said, however, that he has no political affiliation.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Arabs came to Iraq as the war clouds loomed in hopes of fighting off the US-led invasion. Some, no one can say how many, met their deaths as they futilely tried to match US firepower.

But Samir has one major difference from the vast majority of the volunteers: he is Shiite. Iraq is the only Arab country where Islam's smaller sect forms a majority, but the Shiites went virtually unrepresented in Saddam's regime.

"Today, I can say that I've been deceived," said the former volunteer, denouncing those who made him trek about Iraq before finally telling him Saturday to come to this Shiite suburb "in order to kill some communists."

"There aren't any communists here," interrupted the mosque's young cleric, Sheikh Mahmud Zubeidi.

"The Wahhabis manipulated him," the sheikh said, referring to followers of the austere brand of Sunni Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia.

Samir's journey from the Bekaa Valley to the prison of a Baghdad mosque first took him to Damascus, where he was one of 37 volunteers from seven Arab countries.

They gathered together at the Syrian capital's fairgrounds in a meeting organized by the Iraqi embassy and then snuck into Iraq, joining back up at a mosque in the border town of Al-Qaim.

Five days later he was sent to the Saddam mosque in Ramadi, 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Baghdad, where the volunteers were handed Kalashnikov rifles, mortars and grenades. They were each stripped of all identification and given their war orders.

Last Friday, two days after US troops rolled into central Baghdad, Samir realized starkly where he stood with the other volunteers. As they gathered for weekly prayers, Samir, the Shiite, was excluded.

The next day, he was sent with two Syrians and two other Lebanese men to Falluja, 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Baghdad, where US ground forces had not yet arrived.

But then Samir was told to head to an address in Saddam City where a contact would give him his mission. When he got there, he instead was spotted by Shiite militiamen, who took him away.

"He's being treated in accordance with the rules of Islam," said Sheikh Zubeidi, adding that it was up to the wise men of the Shiite holy city of Najaf to decide Samir's fate.

He said the Shiite militiamen had also arrested five other "terrorists," the name given here to Arab volunteers.

Other than Samir, all have been handed over to US custody.

SPACE.WIRE