BAGHDAD - When Jabbar, an elderly Shiite man, stormed out of his house here in June wanting to know where all his furniture had gone, the sharp look of the young Sunni standing guard on his street stopped him cold.

The young man said nothing, but his expression made things clear: Jabbar had no home here anymore.

Out of the more than 151,000 families that fled the sectarian violence in Baghdad, just 7,112 had returned to their homes by mid-July, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration. Many of the displaced remain in Baghdad, just in different areas.

The reasons for the hesitation are complex, based on dangers real and imagined.

In most cases, Iraqis say they feel safe with their neighbors but cannot be sure about other residents. Some are afraid of the new guard forces on their blocks.

The neighborhood teenagers were the worry for Jabbar, who asked to be identified only by his first name. The teenagers brought the war to his family's block in a few disastrous days in 2006, scattering leaflets that told Shiites to leave or "we will use swords to cut your necks." Within days, the area was unlivable, and the family escaped with only the belongings that fit in the trunk of their car.

Security improved, and this spring Jabbar began to look into moving back. His wife went to see their house with a female friend first.

She returned with mixed news. On the bright side, their furniture was still there. But there was a darker flicker: a young man from the local Awakening Council, the new Sunni group paid by the American military to guard the neighborhood, made her feel uneasy. He told her that he knew her sons. He asked how she was going to protect them.

When the family visited the house several weeks later, all that remained was an old VCR. Jabbar had no proof, but he suspected the young Sunni guards on his block had taken the rest.

A short time later, two Shiites were killed a few blocks away. Then, a Sunni renting a relative's house received a threatening letter. When he informed the neighborhood guards, they asked him to prove his Sunni identity and then told him to disregard the letter.

"From that moment, I felt I could not go back to my house again," said Jabbar, who now is trying to sell his house.

In an indication of the immense complexity of today's Iraq, the Sunni sheik in charge of the forces in the area, Abu Saleh al-Aghedi, says Shiites are returning and gets angry at the suggestion that sectarian prejudice still lingers. But there are hundreds of men under him, and not all of them necessarily share his thoughts or obey his orders.

In the words of a retired Sunni civil servant, Qais, who was displaced in 2006, "You trust your neighbor, but you don't know who is five or six doors down."

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