Nadine, the real point is that most of what is happening in Iraq at this point has little to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with sectarian violence and visceral feelings of revenge, fear and defiance. Of course Zawahiri wants Bush to believe that the "central front" of the so-called war on terror is in Iraq. He has a strong preference for the 150,000 American soldiers and 170,000 or so private contractors to be there and not on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Like, duh. Wake up--there is a civil war over there.
In a Baghdad Killing, Questions That Haunt Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, July 13 — At 8:45 a.m. on Friday, Khalid W. Hassan was navigating his car out of one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods on his way to work as a reporter and interpreter at The New York Times bureau here. “My area is blocked,” he wrote in a cellphone text message to the paper’s newsroom manager. “I am trying to find a way out.”
Within 45 minutes, about two miles from his home, Mr. Hassan, whose Palestinian family migrated to Iraq in 1948, was forced to the side of the road by gunmen in a black Mercedes. The gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles, pitting Mr. Hassan’s rundown Kia car with bullets. At least one struck him in the upper body, but failed to kill him.
Mr. Hassan, a heavyset, pranksterish 23-year-old, loved the new world of cellphones, online computers and downloadable videos ushered in by the American occupation of Iraq, so much so that he spent a quarter of his monthly salary recently on another new phone. Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. “I’m O.K., Mom,” he said.
An off-duty policeman in a gasoline station line told Mr. Hassan’s father what came next. A second car with gunmen, an Opel Vectra, seeing Mr. Hassan on his cellphone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Mr. Hassan’s head and neck.
The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr. Hassan’s case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?
With a police force that barely functions because of the bludgeoning it has taken from Sunni insurgents — and that has spawned Shiite death squads — families can rarely hope to see killers tracked down. Now, that may be the fate of Mr. Hassan’s family, for whom he was the principal breadwinner. After his parents separated during his teenage years, Mr. Hassan supported his mother and four sisters, all under 18, by selling cosmetics door to door and, for the last four years, using a polished colloquial English learned through movies, for The New York Times.
Among colleagues who reminisced about him on Friday, Mr. Hassan was remembered for a willingness to venture into some of Iraq’s riskiest war zones, his occasionally imprudent enthusiasm, and a quirky humor. He suggested his colleagues call him “Solid Khalid,” making light of his size.
Mr. Hassan was the second member of The Times’s Iraqi news staff — a group that includes more than 30 journalists in Baghdad and across the country — to be shot and killed. A journalist the newspaper relied on in Basra, Fakher Haider, was taken from his home and killed in the fall of 2005, a murder for which some local officials blamed Shiite militiamen angered by aspects of his work. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, 110 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the American-led invasion in March 2003. The toll includes 88 Iraqis, including Mr. Hassan.
By sunset on Friday, Mr. Hassan was buried alongside hundreds of other victims of Iraq’s recent violence in a makeshift cemetery in the Adhamiya district, miles from his home, that was a children’s soccer field until last year. Adhamiya is a stronghold of Iraq’s Sunni minority, which was ousted from power with Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, and people emerging from evening prayers at a nearby mosque joined the mourning for Mr. Hassan, a Sunni, by shouting slogans against what they called the Shiite “infidels” who have taken power now, and the American “occupiers” who made that possible.
Some friends and relatives of Mr. Hassan believe he probably was a victim of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia founded by the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr. For weeks the Mahdi Army has been locked in a lethal struggle with Sunni extremists for control of Saidiya, Mr. Hassan’s neighborhood in southern Baghdad. The struggle is part of a wider, neighborhood-by-neighborhood contest between Shiite militiamen and Sunni extremists, some linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Together, the two groups have turned Saidiya into one of the city’s most violent war zones. Residents of the neighborhood said Friday that Sunni extremists, many of them teenagers, had moved into vacant apartments in the area, vowing to protect the dwindling Sunni population there. Shiite militiamen, the residents said, have taken up sniper positions, and are entering the neighborhood in police uniforms, then changing into civilian clothes to carry out killings.
It was in the hope of quelling sectarian warfare of this kind, especially in Baghdad, that President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 more troops deployed in Iraq earlier this year. But for the people of Saidiya, the result, five months later, has often been the opposite. With the main American push in neighborhoods farther west, extremists have shifted their focus, preferring to battle it out in areas American reinforcements have not yet reached.
For Mr. Hassan and his family, life became a lottery. Earlier this year, they changed apartments in Saidiya when their previous home was wrecked by a truck bombing that the police said was the work of Sunni extremists. Last month, one of Mr. Hassan’s uncles was killed in a drive-by shooting in the nearby neighborhood of Topchi; the family blamed Shiite extremists. Earlier this week, a colleague of Mr. Hassan’s in The Times’s Baghdad newsroom fled Saidiya after 10 of the 12 families in his building, including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians, moved to neighborhoods elsewhere. The only people left in the building now are a disabled man and his daughter.
Mr. Hassan told colleagues he feared for the lives of himself and his family, but rejected suggestions that he should move. “Where should we go?” he said. “Is there anywhere we would be safe?”
He left no doubt his greatest fear was the Mahdi Army, and his cellphone text message shortly before he was killed indicated he was seeking a way out of Saidiya that would skirt a police checkpoint controlled by Shiite militiamen. That led his family to conclude that Mahdi Army spotters, recognizing his car and knowing him to be a Sunni, might have alerted Shiite gunmen lurking along his route.
But on Friday night, 12 hours after Mr. Hassan died, another cellphone message caused friends and relatives to question their conclusion that he had been the victim of Sunni extremists. A relative reported he had received a text message warning him to quit his job and “return to God” or suffer a fate similar to Mr. Hassan’s. The message was signed by a group calling itself the Brigade of the Mujahedeen, a hitherto unknown group. Mujahedeen, or holy warriors, is a term usually used by Sunni extremists.
Mr. Hassan had insisted in recent conversations that he, like other Iraqis working for Western news organizations, had taken care not to let neighbors know where he worked. The newsroom colleague who left Saidiya this week said Mr. Hassan had been so careful not to disclose anything — that he was a Sunni, a Palestinian and a journalist working with Americans — that he had made no friends in Saidiya, and, recently, had given up visiting the grocery 50 yards from his apartment.
But whatever the motive of his killers, there seemed little doubt that they knew a good deal about him after the shooting. The policeman who saw the killing from his place in the gas station line said that the gunmen, after firing the fatal shots, leaned into Mr. Hassan’s car and took his cellphone, on which he had entered dozens of numbers used in his work, along with his Bluetooth earpiece. The killers also reached into his pockets and took his documents, the policeman said. Among those would have been the American military accreditation issued to all journalists who enter American-controlled areas, as Mr. Hassan often did.
Ali Adeeb, Ahmad Fadam, Stephen Farrell, Wisam A. Habeeb and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
nytimes.com |
