Iraq disintegrates.

The wait is on for the fall of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's U.S.-backed government in Baghdad. "I think it is in the intensive care room," says Mustafa al-Hiti, a member of the Iraqi parliament who spends much of his time in Amman, Jordan. Hiti belongs to the National Dialogue Front, a secular party whose leader, Saleh Mutlaq, managed a chicken farm owned by Saddam Hussein's wife, Sajida. Hiti hopes the government will be put out of its misery.

"The new government must stop Iranian interference in Iraq," he tells me in Amman.

"Iranian interference" is coded language for Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, which is Bush's strongest ally in Baghdad. Ironically, it maintains warm relations with Tehran, where Hakim spent his exile from Iraq and organized Iraqis to fight against Hussein's regime.

Maliki himself appears to be trapped in an impossible position. In the fall of 2005, he was one of the loudest voices amongst the 100-plus members of the newly elected Iraqi interim parliament that decried U.S. interference in the government. He argued that if Iraq, as stated in U.N. Resolution 1546, was indeed sovereign, then its parliament should be allowed to vote on the issue of allowing U.S. troops to remain in the country. This made him acceptable to the popular Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his parliamentary bloc. The Sadr bloc has since withdrawn its support because Maliki refused to bring the issue of the occupation to the parliament. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration twists Maliki's arm to crack down on the militias, something he is powerless to do.

As Maliki's weak and corrupt government collapses along sectarian lines and Bush throws his backing behind the Shiite party least likely to find common ground with the insurgents, Iraq is disintegrating.

"Americans have to be logical," says Muhammad Bashar al-Faidhy, a spokesperson for the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni political group. "They have to know one thing--that they are not going to stay in Iraq. That they are not going to have bases in Iraq."

In 2004, before widespread sectarian violence broke out, Sadr's militia coordinated to some extent with Sunni guerrillas to battle U.S. troops before Sadr was convinced to participate in the political process. But as Shiite outrage over insurgent attacks against civilian targets built, Shiite leaders began to accuse Sunni clerics of not doing enough to prevent such atrocities. Faidhy said things entirely broke down in 2005, when members of the Association of Muslim Scholars and some of Sadr's representatives assembled a convoy of aid for residents of Tel Afar, a mostly Sunni city in the north where U.S. troops were engaged in ground fighting with insurgents. Faidhy accuses Sadr's people of delivering weapons along with the aid to Shiite militiamen in Tel Afar.

"We need to have an alliance with secular and religious Sunnis," says Ghaith Tamimi, a member of Sadr's media department in Baghdad. He says he is hopeful that Sadr's supporters would move away from sectarian politics and ally with Sunnis, though he acknowledges, "We are running out of time on this issue."

But time ran out a while ago, as the execution of Saddam Hussein, with guards chanting "Muqtada, Muqtada," demonstrated.

Even as he speaks of reconciliation, Tamimi himself now occupies a Sunni mosque he and his followers took over as Shiite militias carried out retaliatory attacks in the wake of the destruction of the Askaria Shrine, a Shiite holy site, last February.

The mosque Tamimi occupies is on Palestine Street, a neighborhood south of Sadr City. The presence of the Shiite militia in the area shows that it has strengthened itself outside its traditional stronghold.

Tamimi's followers have barricaded the mosque against attacks. While some sit on the grounds having tea, other men stand guard.

Ali is a twenty-five-year-old carenter living in Hurrea, on the ast side of what has become a rigid front line in Baghdad. Hurrea was once a mixed neighborhood, but following November car bomb attacks in Sadr City, the capital's largest Shiite neighborhood, Shiite militiamen from Sadr's Mahdi Army drove out the remaining Sunnis, burning and occupying mosques and homes.

"It is a civil war, there are civilians just killing each other," Ali says. "Yesterday, three people passed by me and stopped in front of another man and just shot him in the head and walked away. It's just normal. People were watching and they could do nothing. If they talked, they would be killed."

This is going on in "all Baghdad, not just here," he says. "Sunnis are in Ghazalia, Hay al-Adil, and Yarmuk," he says, rattling off areas of the capital. "Hurrea, Shoala, and Khadmiya are Shia. Anyone from the other side who enters the neighborhood will be killed."

The intractable sectarian violence on all sides has sent more than a million Iraqis out of the country, mostly to Jordan and Syria. In Jordan, the initial influx consisted of rich members of the old regime. By putting $150,000 or more in a Jordanian bank, they could buy residency. Now those fleeing Iraq are mostly in dire straits, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has raised concerns that Iraqis are being denied entry into Jordan, reportedly based on sect. Jordan's King Abdullah, who is Sunni, warned of a "Shiite crescent" of influence in the region ranging from Tehran to southern Lebanon.

While shopping in downtown Amman, my fiancee and I strolled into a shop full of backgammon sets and water pipes. The two men working in the shop were watching al-Zawraa, a channel with a strong bent toward the Sunni resistance. It was looping video of Humvees being destroyed by roadside bombs and men in dishdashas launching katyusha attacks.

Hearing her accent--my fiancde is Iraqi--one of the men asked her whether she was a Sunni or "a follower of the ayatollah."

That wasn't a question people asked on the street here a year ago.

David Enders is the author of "Baghdad Bulletin. " Salam Talib and Hiba Dawood contributed reporting for this article.