Crowded into a narrow room beneath an image of the Shiite icon Imam Ali, members of the Garamsha tribe drink tea and discuss current events with visiting journalists. Though reputedly behind most of the car thefts, hijackings, and kidnappings roiling this southern city, the tribesmen seem more interested in politics.

"Baghdad is so violent now, we are uncomfortable linking our fate with it," says Tariq Hamid, as his fellow clan leaders nod. "We support a decentralized form of government, where Basra controls its own affairs."

Like the Kurds to the north, the Shiites of Iraq's southern regions have long bristled under Baghdad's centralized and often brutal control. But with their security relatively stable and newly elected officials in office - particularly the increasingly independent provincial Governing Councils (GCs) - southern Iraqis are pressing the case for decentralization, or federalism.

"We get nothing, Baghdad monopolizes every resource," says Nassaif Jassim, deputy chairman of Basra Province's GC. "To get anything, we have to constantly ask the central government."

Gov. Mohammed Masabih al-Waali of Basra Province agrees. "Basra provides Baghdad with 95 percent of its budget," he says, "and yet we receive back barely 10 percent of our needs for such things as sewage services."

Last month, representatives of the GCs from the southern provinces of Basra, Maysan, and Dhi Qar met to discuss forming a single administrative unit. Basra GC member Hamid al-Dhalimy notes that the US-designed Temporary Administrative Law - which forms the current guidelines for Iraq's government - allows three provinces to unite and veto any provisions to the yet-to-be-written Iraqi constitution.

The south forms a natural bloc, Mr. Dhalimy says, due to its predominantly Shiite population, tribal affiliations that extend throughout the region, and the shared legacy of suffering under Saddam Hussein. "We see an entity called the 'Southern Province' which will have its own legislation, prime minister, and a capital in Basra."

According to David Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the book "Losing Iraq," such a semiautonomous zone would suit the Iraqi mind-set. "A federal Iraq," he says, "must be based on culture and heritage. Baghdad can play a role, but the national government must recognize that a sense of communitarianism is important to the people of this country."

Nezar al-Mansoori, founder of the Federal Center for Developing the Southern Provinces, a Basra-based group of secular politicians and intellectuals interested in decentralization, envisions a three-province country-within-a-country, tied to Baghdad by treaties and possessing its own "army, foreign policy, and judiciary."

In Islam's past, Mr. Mansoori says, "governors paid taxes to the central government only when they felt they received something in return. We want to return to that tradition."

If Baghdad refuses to agree, he hints darkly, "We can muster over 12,000 men who are willing to force the issue to gain Baghdad's attention."

While British polling shows the vast majority of people want a federal structure to the new Iraqi government, many Iraqis are unwilling to go to the extremes suggested by Mansoori, fearing that geographic autonomy will result in an Iraq divided along ethnic and religious lines.

Instead, they are pushing for "administrative federalism," which calls for Baghdad to cede power to local officials.

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