In the small town of Hammam al-Alil, the police have disappeared, the local government has gone vanished and an abandoned National Guard base is currently being looted by teenagers.

The insurgent assault that destroyed part of the police force in the city of Mosul to the north last week also swept away all vestiges of government in the smaller towns of the Tigris valley to the south, forcing the US military to go in and rebuild Iraqi interim government control virtually from scratch.