Fearful of going out after dark, waiting up to 10 hours to fill their cars with gas, spreading rumors in the absence of reliable media, watching landmark buildings set on fire and wondering who is in charge, the residents of this capital are growing increasingly impatient with the deepening disorder that is plaguing their lives more than a month after US troops took over the city.

"My worst fear is chaos, of all hell breaking loose, and it seems like that is happening," says the Jenan Khadimi, an American-Iraqi who teaches architecture at Baghdad University. "You don't know who is running things."

Amid concerns about Baghdad's stability, the US has launched a major shake-up of its postwar administration. The official in charge of civilian reconstruction efforts in Iraq, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, is being replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a former State Department counterterrorism chief. Baghdad's de facto mayor, Barbara Bodine, was also scheduled to leave her post as US coordinator for central Iraq Sunday.

Security in Baghdad, the top of everybody's list of priorities, including the Americans', is deteriorating. Gunfire is heard more often than it was two weeks ago, thieves drag drivers from their cars in broad daylight, and looters continue to steal whatever is left from public buildings in full view of passers by.

Sunday, the telecommunications tower, which had survived heavy bombing, was burned and damaged by vandals.

US officials say they cannot fully control the situation. With less than 150,000 troops in Iraq, a country the size of California, "there are some areas that we don't have totally covered," said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of US ground forces, last week.

Even the presence of US soldiers in Baghdad provides civilians with little reassurance. Though schools were meant to open last week, many families are keeping their children at home, for fear of what might happen to them on their way to class.

Nor does an 11 p.m. curfew ensure nighttime peace. Thieves easily exploit its lax enforcement in the absence of police patrols. "At the beginning we were relieved that the looters did not attack residential districts," says Ms. Khadimi. "But now we are afraid to be in our houses."

Her neighbors, she adds, professional people with no experience with firearms, have begun in recent days to buy AK-47s in self defense.

"Security is a problem in Baghdad, though it is much better across the rest of Iraq," says one coalition official. "It's our number one priority because it is the baseline for everything else." Sixty percent of the capital's ordinary police are reporting for work, he says, "but they don't have the same way of patrolling a beat as we do in the West, so they have to reorganize the way they work."

Nor is anyone really clear what law applies in Iraq. The country is not under martial law, General McKiernan said last week, "but we are in transition. It is a gray area." The situation is complicated, officials point out, by the fact that Saddam Hussein emptied Iraq's jails before the war, allowing 100,000 common criminals onto the streets.

For Baghdadis with cars, a problem almost equal to security is the shortage of gasoline. Adel Hassan al-Mutaar waited from 4:00 a.m. on Saturday until he finally filled up at two in the afternoon at the Al Khalissa station. "You have to line up early, there is no choice," he says. "And to think that we are used to gas stations open 24 hours a day."

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