Marwan was in a hurry. Stuck in traffic in the mixed west Baghdad district of Al-Jihad, the Sunni Arab taxi driver took a short-cut down a side street inhabited by Shi’ites and disappeared. Two days later, the 32-year-old cabbie was found dead in a dusty alley nearby, with a bullet wound to his head. Both his knees had been broken and pierced with an electric drill.
”Marwan was caught at a Mehdi Army roadblock,” childhood friend Ali said in reference to a powerful Shi’ite militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and now accused of leading sectarian violence against Sunni Arabs.
Dozens of Baghdad residents are kidnapped almost daily, after leaving their houses, their offices or just finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their bodies are dumped in ditches or vacant lots, hands tied behind their back with electric wires and eyes blindfolded. The most striking similarity among the victims is a bullet to the head, a signature of sectarian killing.
Victims are also often mutilated or bear signs of torture — drill holes in the body and legs, acid burns, missing fingers or hatchet cuts. Electric drills are a specialty of the Mehdi Army, and beheadings are the trademark of Sunni extremists.
The victims are almost always civilian and the terror of being kidnapped is widespread, affecting families from all walks of life, with husbands, sons and cousins disappearing for no reason.
Relatives rarely go to the police, who are suspected of collusion with the kidnappers since many senior officers are linked to the militias, but instead make the rounds of Baghdad morgues, itself a potentially dangerous trip. Sometimes, they get a call from the victim’s cellphone and are told to pay a ransom, generally several tens of thousands of dollars. If the family is able to pay it, it usually does, if only to retrieve the body.
Executions
”An unprecedented number of execution-style killings have taken place in Baghdad and other parts of the country,” the United Nations said last Tuesday in a bi-monthly report on Iraqi violence. The report said more than 34 000 Iraqis were killed last year, mostly as a result of the inter-confessional conflict.
”Baghdad is at the centre of the sectarian violence,” the report added. ”Sunni and Shi’ite armed groups are attempting to establish territorial control of Baghdad’s many predominately mixed neighbourhoods by intimidating and killing civilian populations and forcing them into displacements to parts of the city inhabited or controlled by members of their ethnic group.”
For Shi’ite militias, the violence is also revenge for bomb attacks and drive-by shootings committed in areas under their control by ”takfiris” or Sunni extremists and their allies from al-Qaeda.
”This is not a new phenomenon. Kidnappings began soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003,” a security specialist said on condition of anonymity.
Initially perpetrated by the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of powerful Shi’ite political party the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, they targeted former agents of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency, ex-members of the former ruling Ba’ath party and officers in Saddam’s army, he added.
At first groups such as al-Qaeda kidnapped Westerners and foreigners to put their anti-United States message across, but that was followed by criminal gangs who went after wealthy Iraqis returning from exile, and the number of kidnappings took off when sectarian violence exploded in February 2006.
Now, whoever ventures beyond the limits of their own district runs the risk of being snatched by masked gunmen at a fake checkpoint or during raids on public or private buses.
Audacious
Some of the most audacious kidnappings are staged in broad daylight, including one at a ministry building, allegedly by Shi’ite militiamen.
In November, dozens of armed men wearing security service uniforms raided a scientific research facility that belonged to the Sunni-dominated Education Ministry and kidnapped almost 150 employees and visitors. Many were later found dead and the bodies bore signs of torture.
The operation was further proof of Baghdad’s precarious security situation that has defied a crackdown in the capital since mid June. This, and similar sweeps by men wearing uniforms of the security services, has discredited the police, who are widely believed to be infiltrated by Shi’ite militias.
For their part, security officials charge that Sunni insurgent groups have begun to kidnap Shi’ite men along with their vehicles, drug them and pack the cars with explosives. The Shi’ites are then reportedly released and the vehicles detonated by remote control when they enter a Shi’ite neighbourhood.
But the bulk of kidnappings in Baghdad are now blamed on militias that form ”death squads” that grab innocent Iraqis and kill them. Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has pledged to crack down on rogue militias and provide those living in Baghdad with more security, but many among the Sunni Arab minority doubt he can do it.
US President George Bush plans to send more US troops to train and back up Iraqi security forces, but many in Washington doubt that will solve the problem. — AFP
