BAGHDAD Hemmed in by blast walls, bunkers and concertina wire, the Iraqi capital's only fully functioning traffic lights stand as lonely sentinels for order in a city long familiar with chaos.

Operating since May, the solar-powered lights in Baghdad's Damascus Square are a first since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein and opened the door to years of insurgency and bloodletting.

The traffic lights are part of efforts to restore life to normality in Iraq, where violence has dropped from bloody peaks reached several years ago, but remains a daily occurrence - as evidenced by Wednesday's deadly bombings.

“What we're concerned about are terrorist attacks, people leaving car bombs behind and things like that, not car crashes,” a traffic policeman at the square, who gave his name only as Hussein, told AFP.

Work at the lights in front of an entrance to the 'Green Zone,' the heavily fortified area of embassies and government offices that previously served as the centre of the American occupation, is hot, dangerous and strenuous.

A tow truck sits permanently at the intersection to scoop up the day's wreckage of cars, a haul that piles up in front of a nearby police station.

The traffic - a whirl of dust-covered old Japanese cars, pickups bearing rifle-toting police, Humvees and black-windowed ministerial convoys - chafes at any attempt at control.

But there are minor victories, traffic policeman Ali Saad said.

“The ministers and the military people stop if they are coming in one car,” he said. “But they don't if they're coming in a convoy.”

Obedience to a blinking light is a major step for Baghdad, where the number of cars has increased from around 250,000 to one million since the invasion - and all without a single new driving licence being issued.

In the wake of the invasion, the one immutable rule of the road was not to stray too close to a convoy of foreign troops or security contractors lest you get shot.

Although American troops withdrew from urban centres on June 30, passing security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, concrete barriers and checkpoints aimed at stopping car bombs and gunmen are still the key method of traffic control.

Baghdad's once extensive network of traffic lights disappeared in the chaotic aftermath of Saddam's overthrow, said police Brigadier Ammar Waleed al-Khayat, a household face because of his daily television traffic reports.

“Every traffic light is defective. Either the equipment was stolen or the lights were removed,” Khayat said.

The city in 2008 installed a fresh crop of traditionally powered lights, he said, but sitting in the traffic police headquarters near Baghdad's imposing interior ministry, it soon became clear why they fail to work.

In the midday heat, the office's neon strip lights juddered on, thanks to the city's three-hour-a-day supply of electricity, and then they promptly cut out.

“How can we run traffic lights with electricity like that?” asked Khayat.

In Damascus Square, the consensus is that things are safer than in years past, when the insurgency and brutal sectarian fighting made much of the city off-limits to traffic police.

But such a sense of safety is relative. A massive truck bomb killed scores and left smouldering wreckage outside the foreign ministry just a few hundred metres away on Wednesday, one of a string of attacks in the capital that killed nearly 100 people.Placing that bomb was probably made possible by another attempt to restore regular life to the streets - the removal of a checkpoint and blast walls outside the ministry.

An intelligence officer, in the uniform of the traffic police, said two officers were killed at the intersection just last month after giving chase to armed men bearing fake police insignia.

Asked if such killings made him fearful, the intelligence officer said he was just embarrassed.

Traffic cop Hussein also said he feels safer than in years past. During some of the worst of the violence in 2006, his commander was assassinated and many colleagues stayed at home, fearful of being killed.

“Before we had to wear body armour and carry weapons, not just a pistol. And be ready,” he said. “The situation is better now. The important thing is that I serve the country.”

Mohammed Abbas, a 32-year-old civil servant from an affluent suburb in north Baghdad, said the lights were part of a general improvement on the streets that has come with reduced violence and the US withdrawal.

“The Iraqi forces are better than the Americans. The American troops could shoot you for no reason. I've heard of many people killed because they drove a little bit close to American patrols,” Abbas said.—AFP