Iraqi exiles in America outnumbered by Arab anti-war protesters

As the Battle of Baghdad raged over the weekend, the battle for the soul of up to 300,000 Iraqi-Americans was joined outside a disused baseball stadium thousands of miles away.

There was an anti-war protest in Detroit on Saturday, as there have been in thousands of cities across the world. But as the original point of the protests fades, in this city the arguments still have a pith and a passion that have disappeared almost everywhere else.

For this is perhaps the most Arabic city in the western hemisphere. A two-mile stretch of Warren Avenue, between Detroit and the suburb of Dearborn, is the nearest thing North America can offer to a traditional souk. Nearly a quarter of Dearborn's population is Arab-American, and they made up a fair proportion of the crowd at Saturday's rally.

But Dearborn is split, and the atmosphere there - never easy since Arab-Americans first moved into the firing line of public opinion 18 months ago - has become almost unbearably snappish. Last month, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary and a man for whom this war is a dream come true, came to Dearborn and was given horror stories of the regime by exiles, which he trumpeted as a sign of support from Iraqi-Americans.

Other Iraqis, however, say the meeting was arranged in secrecy to ensure that only war supporters - most believed to be followers of the Iraqi National Congress, the faction favoured by Mr Wolfowitz - attended. Mr Wolfowitz's friends are mostly refugees who took part in the southern uprising against Saddam after the last Gulf war, escaped to Saudi Arabia when it was crushed and made their way here. But there are older and larger Iraqi communities round Detroit, including many Chaldean Christians, who take a very different line. "The meeting was a total set-up," said Mohammed Alomari, who came to Michigan 33 years ago. "It was just for show."

And there is no question that the pro-war Iraqis are heavily outnumbered by the other Arab communities, especially Yemeni, Lebanese and Palestinian, that dominate the area and oppose US policy. For a non-Arabic speaker, the best clue to the sympathies in each shop comes from which local bilingual paper is lying about: the Arab-American News ("Child war casualties mount") or the Michigan Arab News ("God Bless America!")

Adding to the combustible mix are a horde of FBI officers and other security officials who have been working the area for the past 18 months and have lately been calling in local Iraqis. "People are tense and argumentative," said Haaris Ahmed, of the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It's more verbal than anything else, but there might have been a few people trying to blood each other."

At the rally, one of the crowd was hoping to avoid being blooded. His name was Haider al-Jubury, a supermarket owner, a post-Gulf war refugee from Iraq and a man decidedly out of tune with the demonstrators' mood. Dressed for summer, despite a late blast of snow, he was darting among the crowd, handing out bits of paper - "Don't support the killer," they said - and engaging protesters in arguments with which they struggled to cope.

"My family is in Iraq, they are suffering under Saddam," he said to one dreamy looking young man. "I don't like the war. But what is the solution?"

The man stuttered and stumbled, eventually saying: "Well, we think that the people who are suffering are the people of Iraq." "I asked you to give me the solution," said Mr Jubury, and stalked off. He seemed to be gravitating towards the protesters, avoiding other Arabs. In Detroit it is possible, with a little imagination, to find tension even at a peace rally. "To tell you the truth I'm a bit scared," Mr Jubury said. "Maybe they hit me."

On Warren Avenue, there is more than one kind of tension. At the Tajran bakery they were kneading the pitta without taking their eyes off al-Jazeera, which is showing an altogether less sugary war than the one most of Detroit is watching. Ali the baker, who also escaped after the Shia uprising, spoke to his family in Diwania for the first few days of the war. He has been unable to get through since. "We just worry, worry, worry. Twenty-four hours we watch the news."

Ali volunteered to go along with US troops to help as a translator and fixer. Some men have already gone, but the fog of war has descended on Warren Avenue as well as on Iraq. Mr Jubury, who helped with the recruiting, claims that 2,000 Iraqis have left Detroit. Other reports suggest the Pentagon closed the programme down because it found only a few dozen.

Some people are managing to maintain perspective through it all. In another, non-Iraqi bakery, a Palestinian called Amir was seeing things very clearly: "I don't trust anybody. Iraq. America. American media. Arab media. Everybody lies."