Basra, Iraq - Three weeks ago, in the waning evening heat of this city at the desert's edge, Makki Hussein Tawiyeh - the son of a local tribal leader - emerged with his entourage onto Al-Jazair Street outside one of the city's fanciest functioning restaurants. A young man with a Kalashnikov assault rifle shot him dead.

Tawiyeh's family heads a militia from the rural Garamsha tribe that is widely blamed here for kidnappings, carjackings and other crimes. Within three hours of his killing, Garamsha fighters had mustered a small armada of pickup trucks, some mounted with heavy machine guns, and had driven from their stronghold north of Basra to surround the emergency entrance of Basra Teaching Hospital, where Tawiyeh's body had been taken.

"The fighters were very angry, and they all had Kalashnikovs," said Fatih, a guard at the hospital. One demanded of nervous hospital employees: "'Is this information true, that Sheik Makki has been killed?'" Fatih recalled.

Unable to produce the young sheik in any condition likely to satisfy his militiamen, nervous hospital workers could only confirm the tragic news. The militiamen blasted skyward with torrents of gunfire, then drove their pickups to Al-Jazair Street. There, witnesses said, they sprayed bullets at pedestrians and shopfronts, killing four people and injuring seven before speeding home.

The nearly six months of British army occupation in Basra has been a season of killing. After riots last month, crime and violence have spiked in September. Hospitals report a rising toll of people killed or injured in carjackings, robberies, feuds and unexplained attacks with guns or grenades. But with U.S. officials and international media focused more on the Sunni-led guerrilla war against U.S. troops in central Iraq, Basra's violence has gotten little attention.

Justly or not (and often in blithely racist terms), city dwellers have labeled the rural Garamsha a public enemy. And they are angry that the British haven't driven their tanks out to take down the Garamshas' headquarters north of the city.

"You see, these milk-makers [the Garamsha and other tribes traditionally raised buffalo for milk and cheese to sell to city residents] have never really become civilized," said Abid Al-Batat, a local journalist from an elite family.

Still, al-Batat does not blame only the Garamsha.

"Basra province is like Lebanon in the 1970s. We have many groups: 540 tribes and clans," he said, and remnants of Saddam Hussein's secret police and Baath Party are encouraging the unhappiest of them to take up arms to get what they want.

Basra's violence has many roots, said Dhergham, a doctor at Al-Faiha Hospital. Too many people are desperate and too few are police officers. Tribes, sects, the Baathists and their old victims all have old scores to settle and new freedom to do it. Still, "the Garamsha are the biggest problem," he said. "They have several hundred fighters and even heavy weapons such as artillery."

Like Fatih, Dhergham made it clear he would be grateful to avoid having his last name needlessly published in connection with any quotations Garamsha militiamen might find upsetting. Al-Batat, the journalist, stressed that a man of his stature had no such worries. "My father was the head of the al-Batat clan, and I have the support of Basra's society. I'm a 'sayid,'" a linear descendant of the prophet Muhammad, "so I can write and speak about the Garamsha without getting killed."

"Only a few Garamsha have taken up criminal activities; many criminals in Basra are from other tribes," said Saeed Thamer, a Garamsha leader. On Wednesday, Garamsha elders issued a declaration, witnessed by leaders of other tribes, that they would not support looting, carjacking, kidnapping or drug trafficking. "If anyone of the Garamsha tribe commits such crimes and is killed by someone of another tribe, the Garamsha will waive its right of revenge" in his defense, the Garamsha leaders said.

After the Tawiyeh family militia shot up Al-Jazair Street, British forces confiscated a number of the fighters' armed pickup trucks, but the British have resisted the city dwellers' demands for an offensive against the Garamsha militia.

The Garamsha are not the only tribe that includes organized criminal gangs, said Maj. Charlie Mayo, spokesman for the British forces in southern Iraq. "It's just that they're a bit more ... overt."

"It would be very easy just to go in and arrest people," Mayo said, "but we think the better way to solve this is to use the traditional tribal system" for negotiating disputes among clans and tribes, and the embryonic new Iraqi police force for dealing with criminal matters.

British forces in the south, like U.S. troops in central and northern Iraq, are putting enormous hopes in the new police. After having been vetted and hired by the occupation authority, then retrained and issued new uniforms, the force now appearing on the streets is building confidence among Iraqis, Mayo said. "People are beginning to trust the police and tell them what's going on."

On Basra's streets, there is little sign of that. Most residents interviewed said the retraining - a week or two before deployment, with on-the-job instruction to follow - is too little for a quick, effective police force.

After decades of dealing with a cowed population, officers are more timid these days about confronting criminals who often outgun them, residents said.

After Tawiyeh's killing and the revenge shootings Sept. 7, Garamsha tribesmen kidnapped the son of a prominent imam in the neighborhood, a man of the Bani Amr tribe. The Bani Amr assembled their own truckloads of fighters and headed toward the Garamsha headquarters for a showdown.

British troops intervened to prevent a battle and leaned on the tribes to settle peacefully. The kidnapped man was released last week, officials and local journalists said. The police had been left out of it.