"INTELLECTUALS AND WELL EDUCATED PEOPLE...ARE A MINORITY"

In a nation where everyone reads the National Enquirer...

U.S. forces did not win the war, Saddam Hussein is a CIA agent and Ariel Sharon just bought a house on the banks of the Tigris -- so say the pages of Baghdad's newspapers, where conspiracy and rumour reign supreme.

The scores of papers that have sprung up in the capital since the war ended print a breathless mix of dubious opinion and urban myth to feed the insatiable appetite of Baghdadis for fresh gossip, however unreliable.

That reflects, in part, the quality of journalism in a country that went virtually overnight from having no independent news media to having almost too much.

But it is also a measure of the chaos and ignorance the Iraqi population is living in. No one is sure what's really going on and so rumour and conspiracy theory surge in to fill the void...

Qanadeal, The Lights, recently ran a report that Israeli Jews were flocking to Baghdad in droves to buy property -- ignoring, among other things, the fact that foreigners are still banned from owning real estate in Iraq.

Perhaps hoping to top that ''scoop,'' a competing paper ran a headline saying ''Ariel Sharon buys house by Tigris'' and repeated widespread talk that a gang of agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is living in a Baghdad hotel...

The gossip and rumour-mongering extend to outlandish explanations of real events.

After the truck bomb blast at the Jordanian embassy two weeks ago, local reports were full of talk that U.S. helicopters were hovering moments before the blast. Witnesses swore they saw missiles fired at the embassy compound.

Similar rumours quickly circulated after the bombing of the United Nations headquarters this week. Some eyewitnesses claimed to have seen a missile hit the building even though investigators say the explosion was caused by a truck bomb.

Now theories are already doing the rounds that U.S. forces might have attacked the U.N. headquarters because they don't share the U.N.'s vision for post-war Iraq.

Hafud Al-Shimary, a photographer in downtown Baghdad, says it is a natural development in a country where for three decades everyone was told what to think and most struggled to separate truth from fiction.

''Intellectuals and well-educated people don't believe any of this nonsense, but they are a minority,'' said Shimary, gesturing towards newspapers on his desk.