"We are furious about people pointing guns at us," said Hamid Hussein, 33, pushing his broken-down Volkswagen bus to the front door of his house this morning. A United States Army Humvee was parked in the middle of his street, and a soldier in the turret ordered Mr. Hussein in English to stop where he was.

If the complaint is not about security, then it is about the lack of electricity this week in Baghdad. 

"Don't talk to me about Saddam Hussein," snapped Ibrahim Aullaiwi, a 46-year-old shop owner in the poor neighborhood of New Baghdad. "The Americans are in charge of everything here. They could have brought generators in here within 24 hours."

Like Mr. Aullaiwi, many residents of Baghdad seem to ignore the fact that the electricity disruption was caused at least in part by sabotage and looting. Seething in 110-degree heat without air-conditioners, fans or refrigerators, many residents were already furious about chronic power failures over the past two months.

Whether battling saboteurs or snipers, American and British occupation leaders find that the public mood has turned critical, even though countless Iraqis remain pleased that Saddam Hussein is gone and still place considerable hope in the Americans and British to improve things. 

The scorn, and the risk to the Western forces, can go together. That was the case when an angry crowd in the southern town of Majar al Kabir killed six British soldiers on Tuesday, and many residents contended that the British set off the disturbance by trying to search Muslim homes, a claim the British dispute.

American soldiers sometimes infuriate Iraqis by running afoul of time-honored tradition. On Thursday, soldiers on patrol in an Army convoy here heard gunshots and rushed into a house from all sides. It turned out there was a wedding party under way, a ceremony that often occurs on Thursday evenings and is celebrated with gunfire. The Americans added to the anger among the revelers by roughly grabbing and arresting a young man who was trying to sneak off in a taxi with his gun, according to a witness. 

Earlier this month when thousands of American troops raided what they believed were bases for loyalists to Saddam Hussein, provoking a lengthy firefight that killed four Iraqis, the Shiite newspaper Al Dawa described the deaths as "martyrdom."

The drumbeat of daily attacks on allied soldiers, meanwhile, is forcing military leaders to strike back with measures that often increase anger and fear. 

Soldiers in full-body armor, often without translators, show up at houses in the middle of the night and politely but firmly demand to search for weapons. Jittery soldiers in Humvees and tanks point machine guns at Iraqi cars that show the slightest hint of irregular behavior.

The tensions seem certain to increase. Attacks on American soldiers, though they do not endanger the overall military plan, have continued steadily for three weeks.

Today in Baquba, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, an unidentified person threw a grenade at American soldiers in a Humvee. The grenade missed the soldiers but wounded two Iraqis who happened to be shopping nearby.

The scene made for grisly images today on Al Jazeera, the Arabic television network based in Qatar: bloodied Iraqis at the sides of American soldiers.

Late Friday night, a grenade attack in the Baghdad district of Thawra left one American soldier dead, four soldiers wounded and one Iraqi interpreter wounded.

In yet another neighborhood of Baghdad that night, residents said someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an American armored personnel carrier. Military officials could not confirm the incident as of early this afternoon.

Those were merely the most recent deadly incidents in a week that included sniper attacks on individual soldiers, bombs placed under trucks and rocket-propelled grenades fired at Humvees.