They minutely examined a copy of The New Yorker they found in the back seat, one of them muttering "haram" - forbidden - at a cartoon of a woman with a low-cut blouse. My belongings were gradually returned apart from the satellite phone. I saw a black-clad gunman stuff it into his ammunition belt but it would have been unwise to protest. At this moment a firefight broke out with US troops on the other side of the Euphrates. We saw machine-gun bullets strike the wall of the mosque above our heads, sending up little puffs of dust. In the face of this new attack our captors became much more friendly and took us to their headquarters beside the shrine in Najaf where we were freed.The danger of reporting in Iraq made it easier for the US and the Iraqi government to pretend that progress was being made. To take one example, in November 2004 the US Marines assaulted and captured Fallujah, a victory widely covered by embedded correspondents.

But as the assault began the insurgents rose up in Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq, and captured 30 police stations and great quantities of arms and ammunition. The 3,000-strong Iraqi police force went home or changed sides. The event was hardly noticed by the outside world because there were no embedded reporters to write about it. Iraqi officials studiously avoided putting to the test their claim that most of Iraq was safe. A British correspondent flew with Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister, in his helicopter on as trip billed as a meeting with ordinary Iraqis. They took off from the Green Zone in the prime ministerial helicopter and flew two miles across Baghdad to the heavily guarded Police Academy.

Here Allawi briefly addressed police recruits, and 10 minutes later they were back in the safety of the Green Zone.A diminishing number of Iraqis were hopeful each time the US and its Iraqi allies announced that some new hurdle on the road to democracy and prosperity has been overcome. In June 2004, Mr Allawi's interim government supposedly took over from the occupation authorities, though many of the ministers were chosen by the US and UN envoys Robert Blackwill and Lakhdar Brahimi Violence lessened for a few weeks and then intensified. The same thing happened after the elections in January this year when the Shia and the Kurds won a majority and the Sunni boycotted the poll. After prolonged negotiations a government was formed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the new Prime Minister.