The charm of old Baghdad is finally gone.

Rashid Street, the once vibrant heart of the city, has been in decline for decades, its intellectual life choked by repression, its cafes and stores strangled by war and sanctions.

But it has taken the anarchy, crime and guerrilla violence unleashed after the United States overthrow of Saddam Hussein to kill off what was left of Rashid Street's colonnaded, Ottoman-era charm. Its habitues barely dare hope it can ever be revived.

In the final years of Saddam's long rule, one could still find in the cafes on Rashid Street the odd intellectual who had survived persecution.

Debate was muted, but moods could be discerned in whispers and the way people said things.

The downtown district had fallen into decay, its buildings crumbling. The old town was neglected at the expense of modern, concrete development elsewhere in the city.

Rashid Street, lined with Italianate stone arcades, was well lit and kept fairly clean. Traffic lights worked and shops opened and closed at normal hours.

At the Um Kalthoum cafe, named after the Egyptian singer famed across the Middle East, the mood was often grim, but customers would still stay until midnight playing chess, drinking hamedh, a hot drink of boiled dried lime, and listening to the diva's songs on recordings from the 1960s.

After Saddam's downfall, cafe owner Zeid Abbas planned to expand by opening another establishment dedicated to Mohammad Abdelwahab, a pillar of early 20th-century Arab music.

Those plans have been shelved as fear of the state has been replaced by fear of anarchy. The people of Rashid Street long for a stability that they have to go back many decades to recall.

``If the situation ever improves, I would open a cafe in honor of King Faisal,'' says Abbas, referring to the British-installed monarch overthrown in 1958.

``At least there was stability then.''

``The disasters started in 1958. I cannot answer whether now or Saddam is better. Incomes are up, but there is no security,'' says Abbas, sitting among customers playing chess.

``There is no tolerance either. If any group finds my opinion offensive they will bomb my business.''

Two or three years ago, there were tourists on Rashid Street and Arab students visited the nearby 13th century Mustansiryia School, which had an estimated 80,000 books. Antique shops stocked old Persian carpets that once affluent Iraqis were forced to sell when Saddam's wars bankrupted the country.

Around the corner on al-Mutanabi Street, books deemed too bold for the ruling Baath Party taste - Hanna Batatu's classic The Old Classes and Social Movements of Iraq, say - could be found if the manager could trust the client's discretion.

A crowd still gathered on Friday nights at the Baghdad Museum, looted after the war and now closed, to listen to maqam, Iraq's unique contribution to world music.

Now, a certain pride that remained resilient in the face of Saddam's violence, as well as the optimism that flickered briefly after the war, have been all but obliterated.

Haifa Street across the river has turned into an urban battlefield. Sewage and garbage block Rashid Street's southern end near the Public Works Ministry. The northern end leading to the Iraqi Central Bank is clogged with barbed wire.

Shops close as early as noon, and armed gangs roam the area shortly after. There is not a policeman in sight.

Bodies are sometimes dumped in the neighborhood, part of a low intensity war of liquidation between Islamist militias and members of the former security apparatus.

``We are paying a price for our freedom. Little is in our hands except to wait for a fair day to come,'' says Abu Sameh, who has been selling postcards on the street for decades.

The building opposite him was burnt out a few months ago, struck by one of Baghdad's daily stray mortars and rockets.

On al-Mutanabi Street, some bookshops have switched into selling generators - there is an electricity crisis. Books on Islam dominate the stalls in a city that was once among the most secular in the Middle East.

Cafe owner Abbas' family saw benefits from American spending. His sister, a teacher, was happy after the war with a salary increase and bought a television and refrigerator.

But she has not worked since a bullet struck her six months ago as she stood on her doorstep: ``It ripped through her upper left side. Doctors were amazed. Iraqis are becoming familiar with new bullets,'' Abbas says.

For the Um Kalthoum's customers who remember decades back, this is an Iraq they scarcely recognise.

Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Asadi returned to Baghdad after 28 years in exile.

He wrote of the experience in Al-Hayat newspaper: ``The faces at Um Kalthoum cafe are scarred by oppression. The clothes are torn, and the souls are smashed. There is no hope in the eyes. These faces massacred me.

``I wanted to yell or weep,'' wrote Asadi, who returned last year to see the mother he left waiting for him on a street corner in 1976 as he fled without warning from Saddam's police.

``Saddam Hussein, that pig. He turned Iraqis into dirt, as he once said. Iraq is being crushed by hunger, theft. Kidnappings and bombs exploding under the feet of ordinary people. Where is the hope? In US tanks and warplanes?''

REUTERS