Phillip Robertson

While the final responsibility for maintaining order in Kabul rests with Afghanistan’s interim government, the 3,000 to 5,000 ISAF troops effectively serve as their muscle. There are 16 nations with troops in the ISAF, including Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Jordan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey. But for the next six weeks at least, ISAF is being led by the British. The British have sent more than 1,500 peacekeepers to Afghanistan, along with all the equipment and personnel necessary to support them. Their barracks are set away from the street, where there’s communications gear, a good-sized mess tent, and probably other things which we weren’t allowed to see for security reasons.

New peacekeepers are constantly arriving in Kabul. They come in small groups; exactly how many are on the ground is still a mystery. Although no formal decision has been made by the interim government here, or the United Nations, the peacekeepers expect they will soon spread out beyond Kabul to other major Afghan cities such as Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar. In most of those places, warlords are busy calculating their personal fortunes with the new government and vying for governorships, Cabinet posts, U.N. aid and international sponsorship. Rumors are flying, most of them utterly false, but they do point to what people are afraid of. Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, one of the men who helped reduce Kabul to a ruin in 1993, is said be in Iran, arming himself and getting ready to make war on the peacekeepers and the United States, in a replay of the jihad against the Russians in the 1980s.

Whether or not ISAF goes beyond Kabul will be up to the government of Afghanistan, McColl has said. Wednesday, Francesc Vendrell, deputy special representative of the United Nations Secretary General for Afghanistan, said the international peacekeeping force should be much bigger, stretch beyond Kabul, and plan on staying for a while.

Vendrell said a larger peacekeeping force is needed as tensions escalate in pockets around the country. On Wednesday, fighting had already broken out in the Paktia province between rival ethnic Pashtun warlords, and unrest threatened to engulf other parts of the country. Peace, Vendrell said, could only be restored with a larger, international presence.

“For that, you do need the deployment of an international force. The international force needs to be deployed beyond Kabul, and the Afghans want it — even the warlords say they want it,” he told the BBC.

Clearly, the peace that has come to Afghanistan is still an uneasy one. It is now a country full of desperate young men who spend their days trying to figure out what to do next. In Kabul, like the rest of the country, many of them have weapons stashed out of sight, either as an insurance policy, or as preparation for something else.

Restoring a lasting peace in Afghanistan will be a delicate task. As the new Afghan government begins to coalesce, some of these regional power brokers are bound to feel left out, their men dissatisfied from having won the war and having nothing to show for it. Now that the war is over, many tribal soldiers have been sent home impoverished, ashamed to face their families. A good number of them have chosen instead to stay where they are rather than face the shame of going home. The bazaar in Jalalabad has more than its fair share of these fighters — gaunt, depressed men who go to their former commanders to beg for money, clothes and food.

One man came to his commander last week in a Jalalabad hotel, once word got out that he was in town, and said he needed bus fare to go home to Peshawar. “There are so many of them, what should I do? I have already given them most of my money,” the commander, a former mujahedin fighter from Nangarhar province explains to me. “Everyone is in the same situation.”

These rootless mujahedin are everywhere. As the commander and I spoke, there was a steady procession of men asking for his help. These are men with no money or food. The one thing they do have is a healthy supply of automatic weapons. The ISAF is here, in part, to make sure that international aid can reach Afghanistan’s needy, and to keep the weapons silent.

The ISAF has set up their information office on the fourth floor of the Mustafa Hotel on Chicken Street, the central hangout for the international press. In their suite ISAF information officers Harry and Jonathan give me coffee, and tell me there is a patrol going out that night if I’d like to tag along.

“Sure,” I tell them. “Count me in.”

Kabul is high in the mountains, set in a pocket surrounded by tall hills. At night, if there’s a moon, the hills and mountains look like the backs of whales as they rise up out of the water. Treeless. A scattering of houses with electricity.

The convoy of paratroopers we are going to tag along with pulls up to the gate, one covered jeep and two open personnel carriers. For such large, bulky machines, they really move. It is clear that they won’t wait long for us to get in. The mood is serious, keyed up, and talking is pretty much out of the question. In the two open vehicles, seven paratroopers sit with their legs over the side, their science fiction guns down in what a military spokesman might call a non-threatening posture. They bristle with radios. Each soldier communicates with the rest of his unit through a headset and microphone. To move around in the dark, they have night-vision goggles and night-vision gun sights. In place of the wool Afghan pakul, the paratroopers wear red berets. They might as well be from a different planet.

A sergeant major gets out of the lead vehicle to explain things before we head out. “Right, when we come to a checkpoint, don’t be surprised when the Afghans jump out with their guns up, shouting at us. They often don’t know who we are.” In Kabul, there are cobbled-together checkpoints scattered throughout the city, usually at major intersections, populated by militiamen in fatigues, native dress or a haphazard mix of the two. It is impossible to tell just by looking who they are, or where their allegiances lie. To figure this out you have to ask, “Who is your commander?” or “Which province are you from?” to get a clearer picture of what their individual deal happens to be, to know the fighter’s provenance. But from a peacekeeper’s point of view, anybody with guns is a threat. There’s this uncertainty reminiscent of Vietnam, the same “We’re here to help you” rhetoric, a condemnation of a universal evil, this time terrorism instead of Communism. There are only a million ways this mission could turn sour.

From the peacekeepers themselves, you don’t hear a lot of bitching about the fragility of the situation, especially from the officers, who like to give long, sincere monologues on the reasons and objectives for the ISAF mission. Intelligent and articulate speeches are fine, but these little soliloquies seem to be some sort of positive affirmation of what the West wants to come to pass — a future where the developed nations can lead Afghanistan out of desperate poverty and war.

That ultimate fantasy still seems a long way off.

The soldiers leave their bases and drive around the shattered city. More often than not, they wave, and the citizens of Kabul wave back. It’s not friendly every time — they get their share of catcalls and curses in Dari — but the soldiers are unfazed. It’s worth noting that this particular group from the paratroop regiment have been to a catalog of the world’s most dangerous, evil, unpredictable places, a list that starts with Northern Ireland and gets progressively worse. Some have just arrived from Macedonia.

The three British vehicles steam down the street, staying together, the last driver stepping on it whenever a large gap develops between his jeep and the one in front. The plan is to head south across the Kabul River, swing past the soccer stadium, cross back over the river and return home. British patrols form a careful web that extends outward from the city center into the suburbs. They are lightly armed, travel in unarmored vehicles and keep their bulletproof vests under their fatigues, all part of the low-profile policy sent down from above. Patrol routes are named after colors. Indigo. Maroon.

As we race down Bibimahro Street, the soldiers wave, and Kabulis wave back. It is bitterly cold and in the open jeep the air shoots past like a gale. Adding to the unpleasantness, one huge soldier lets out a champion fart between friendly waves at the population.

“Jesus, what’s that?” the guy next to him wants to know.

“Steak and chips,” the farter explains.

“You had the steak and chips then?”

“Yeah.”

They laugh. The whole unit must have heard it over the radio.

We cross the Kabul River and turn down a street into a neighborhood so damaged by shelling it seems no one could possibly live there. It is late; most people are inside, off the streets. Nights in Kabul have become even too weird for the local residents. Suddenly, the convoy pulls over and the men get out.

At that moment, it seemed noble to go out into the uncertainties of the Kabul night with so little in the way of protection. My mind was racing with all of the paranoid fantasies of what could happen. A person with a hard on for destruction could have fired a Russian rocket-propelled grenade at the waving soldiers, just for kicks.

The paratroopers move out into the street, keeping a strange, perfectly choreographed formation. No two men walking abreast or single file. Each one turns, walks backward for a few paces, then swivels around to face the front again. At every intersection, the men who get there first take up defensive positions along the walls, sighting down the streets. One soldier hears a dog barking down an alley, and with brisk movements, raises his weapon and night-visions it until it isn’t interesting anymore. He clicks back into the strange dance of the others — some men moving forward, some staying back. This is all done in near-perfect silence.

Fifteen minutes later, down one of the dead alleys and across from an old Soviet apartment building, an old mujahedin soldier named Nazir Mohammed comes out to talk to the sergeant major. He is frail from sleeping in the cold, his chest caved in. He explains that he was a soldier in many wars. The British soldier towers over him. The old man invites the soldier in for tea.

Haidar’s 50 Cent tape was the perfect soundtrack for the capital, now a gangland paradise brutally rewritten by explosions and the violent incarnations of greed and revenge. I found the music helped with the lethal comedy of the place. It was Haidar whom I asked to set me up with a meeting with a certain cop from Sadr City.

I wanted to talk to the cop because I wanted to find out more about a place called al-Seddeh and a mysterious figure named Abu Dereh. I’d been looking into a secret Mahdi Army court located in Sadr City, which pronounces summary sentences upon the Sunni captives who end up before it. Those same captives would later be found in shallow graves, bound and bearing signs of torture, in an empty field at the edge of Sadr City, a piece of waste ground called al-Seddeh, which Iraqis have nicknamed the “Happiness Hotel.” Abu Dereh, or “Father of Shield,” is a name that kept coming up in interviews about this court. One police source said he was the major figure behind the death squads and he carried out the sentences. I began to think of Abu Dereh as a dark king inside Sadr City, the face the sheiks and imams did not want exposed to the press.

The initial plan was to ride in a police convoy, take a quick look at the dumping site and then get out. In any case, a visit would have to be made with gunmen, since going alone would be impossible, and I made a decision to try the police first. An earlier police contact had stopped answering the phone, and going through Haidar and his friends was a backup plan.

On June 9, Haidar’s contact told us that we had to wait for the officer, a man named Sgt. Ahmad, at a restaurant in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood called Talbiyah. Talbiyah was under the putative control of the Mahdi Army. The cop had told Haidar, “Go to the Habaibna restaurant at 3 p.m. and call me when you get there.” We were at the restaurant five minutes early. Haidar followed the instructions and called the cop and let him know we had arrived.

The Habaibna is a famous place in Baghdad. It’s one of those big open-air restaurants where the men make juice drinks in the shade of the awning and the guys working the grill make decent shawarma. I’ve met Sadr contacts there over the past three years and have felt like it was a reasonably safe bet. The rules for the Shiite parts of town are different. I would never have waited on the street for a contact in a Sunni part of town. That would have been a death sentence.

We waited at one of the tables under the awning. Fifteen minutes went by and the cop had not arrived. It was obvious we were being watched by everyone in the place, but since we were waiting for the police, I decided to wait for a few more minutes.

We kept calling the cop, trying to find out when he was planning to arrive. He kept saying he would be there in a few minutes, a few minutes longer, I’m at the gas station, I’ll be right there.

After the last of our calls, four members of the restaurant staff came over in a group and told us we had to leave. One of the restaurant men, a short man with a thin beard wearing a black shirt, said they were kicking us out was because we hadn’t ordered anything, and also because we were making the other customers nervous.

After the restaurant men came over and told us to leave we walked back out in the blinding sun to the car. Instead of leaving the neighborhood, we drove to a spot about 50 feet from the Habaibna on a broad boulevard named after Saddam’s beloved Nazi uncle, Khairallah Tulfa, where I could watch the arriving police patrols. A few police officers stopped and questioned us and we explained we were waiting for Sgt. Ahmad, so they led us down the street another 200 feet and told us to wait by their vehicles under a large shade tree. “The Habaibna is a bad place, you should come with us,” one cop said and we followed them.

Having covered the Mahdi Army for a few years now, I was not particularly worried about serious kidnapping attempts coming from their direction. They are not particularly keen on kidnapping foreigners, and Muqtada al-Sadr has stated that he is against the kidnapping of journalists. The few Western hostages they have seized have been freed after a few days of phone calls to various sympathetic sheiks. There is one notable exception: Steven Vincent, who was murdered in Basra in 2005 while looking into militia infiltration of the police. His killers have not been caught or identified.

I was making friendly conversation with a few of the officers when an ordinary-looking man in his 40s walked over. “I have seen some suspicious men down the street. They are loading fuel into a tank in their car, I think they are terrorists,” the informant said. One of the SUVs full of friendly cops immediately left to check on the tip. This meant there was only one vehicle left under the shade tree with us.

Five minutes later, Sgt. Ahmad finally showed up with two police SUVs, more than an hour late. Sgt. Ahmad was an imposing man, tall and with an angular jaw. When he arrived, the first thing he did was open the door of the police vehicle parked near us and in a low voice tell the driver to beat it. This scared Haidar and he stopped translating; he was just waiting for Ahmad to give him instructions. After sending off the last of the friendly cops, Ahmad turned to Haidar and asked him which story I was working on. Haidar told him everything — all the details of the death squad investigation, including the names of people I had interviewed.

I could see that Ahmad didn’t like it. He didn’t want to hear the name Abu Dereh in Sadr City or the names of officials in the Mahdi Army whom I had talked to. Those names carried serious weight and would only mean problems for him.

Haidar shouldn’t have told him all those details, but he was frightened and wanted to leave. By telling the cop what I was working on, he thought it would go easier for him.

My conversation with Ahmad lasted three minutes. The police sergeant said he had to go, but to ask any question I wanted. It was immediately clear to me that he would not answer any of my questions, and Ahmad knew I knew this. His responses were brief, useless and full of disinformation. Ahmad told me that Sadr City was fine, there were no problems there, that the police were protecting people. I thanked him. Then he walked away from us so he could make a phone call we could not overhear, more strange behavior.

By this time, I was worried. I gave up on the interview and headed for the car. Ahmad’s patrol pulled away down the street, leaving us alone on Khairallah Tulfa street. We got into Haidar’s car. He started the engine and was just pulling away from the curb when the attack started.

A dark sedan carrying four men suddenly crossed the median of Khairallah Tulfa going in the wrong direction, heading straight for us, trying to cut us off. When the driver hit the brakes, there was about 15 feet between our respective fenders. I remember exactly what I was thinking as our cars approached each other: “Who is this guy who can’t drive?” Their car stopped and the shotgun passenger got out with a Kalashnikov. But Haidar had seen the men carrying weapons in the car a second before I did. He hit the gas, swerving around the dark sedan and the man in the road with the rifle. It was a matter of split-second timing, and the attackers had miscalculated. If they had approached faster, they would have been able to block our car.

As Haidar drove around the dark sedan, the man with the rifle opened fire. He fired a long burst, going through an entire magazine, but the bullets never struck the car, either because he had no weapons discipline or because he was deliberately shooting in the air to try to stop us. In any case, firing directly into the car might have lessened the value of a Western hostage.

I put my head down and did not look back after he started shooting, only straight ahead to the open street in front of us, listening to the loud, ripping sound of the rifle. The attackers in the sedan had wanted us to stop, but we did not stop. We finally were clear of them and Haidar hit the gas and the Nissan pulled out and accelerated down the street empty of traffic.

When gunfire erupts on a street in Baghdad, drivers find the quickest way to turn around and head away from the shooting. People drive over medians, up on the curbs, anything that will put some distance between them and the firefight. And this is exactly what the Bedouins driving the vegetable truck were doing in the opposite lanes after the men in the dark sedan opened fire on us. The driver of the truck crossed the median in front of us, heading into our lanes, completely blocking them as he executed his turn. In his fear and desperation to get away from the attackers, Haidar never touched the brakes. We hit the truck going 40.

There was the instant of the crash — the looming truck and then the feeling of striking the dashboard, the sound of a skull hitting the dashboard and a flash of pain. Haidar’s head hit the steering wheel. The front end of the car absorbed most of the energy of the collision. It was destroyed, but neither of us were seriously injured, a miracle.

A second after we hit the truck, Haidar opened his car door and sprinted into the street over broken glass and car parts. I did the same, looking back to see if we were being pursued. I saw no dark car, no sign of the attackers. After the commotion of the accident, there was no way the men in the sedan could have made a second attempt. We watched from a side street as the Iraqi police from the nearest station arrived with five patrols and blocked off the street, and immediately got into a fight over who had jurisdiction over the crash. The cops put us in an SUV and drove us out of the neighborhood, stunned and beat up from the crash.

After three hours at a local police station where Haidar was interrogated, the police took us back to the Hamra with their sirens on, firing warning shots out the windows, which is their usual way of driving around Baghdad.

Later, I was visiting Umm Hassan, a kind Shiite woman, at her modest house, and after I told her the story she said without surprise, “You should sacrifice a sheep in thanks.”

We never found out who the attackers were, which group they belonged to or what they wanted with us. In retrospect, after going through a long, paranoid chain of best guesses, I decided that it was probably Sgt. Ahmad who set up the kidnapping attempt. The cop finally had to put in an appearance to make sure it went off properly. Ahmad knew where we were and what time we would be there. The guys in the restaurant were probably tipped off that something was going down, which is why they hustled us out. And the ordinary-looking 40-year-old man who told the friendly cops about the suspicious characters was in on the plan, too: He was trying to lure the friendly patrols away and leave us unguarded.

Iraqis fear kidnapping as much as they fear anything else, and with good reason. While the few Western hostages (fortunately) get a great deal of press in their home countries, large numbers of Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Lately, there has been a trend away from taking single hostages, toward taking them by the dozen. Entire buses and offices have been cleared out by armed men with unknown affiliation. Workers on the way to work, people leaving for the Syrian border by road on buses, store owners, embassy workers, Iraqis doing business with Western companies, anyone. Mass kidnappers near Taji have demanded identification from the victims and sorted them according to whether they are Sunni or Shiite, killing those who are in the opposing group. No one is immune.

Last year during a patrol in Dora with the California National Guard, we were driving down the southern highway at midnight and found the body of a man lying in the road with a single gunshot wound to his chest, the blood pouring out onto the tarmac. He’d been dumped there, possibly killed for his car, or the victim of a sectarian attack. The man’s body looked broken and ruined on the road.

I remember another incident, a few weeks later on another patrol, in the Western neighborhood of Amariyah. I was with a group of soldiers when we found an abandoned white sedan, still running. A translator for a Western embassy had been driving it. The man had been captured only moments before our humvee had turned the corner but now he was definitely gone, no longer present, another one of Baghdad’s ghosts.

More dead will arrive as stunned and furious men mill around the main checkpoint near the gate, their minds adrift in grief that is already turning into hatred. Many of the men waiting are wearing the familiar black shirts and the thin beards of the Mahdi Army, which means that the morgue, like other government offices, is essentially under militia control. The guards all have obvious affiliations with unofficial armed groups, as do the police.

There are families here claiming their own beloved dead, militiamen claiming comrades, and many of those left alive are naturally thinking about revenge, which will be taken in time by brothers and sons of the deceased. On this nightmarish and ordinary day, most of the people at the gates are Shiites — an imbalance that stems from the mass executions and bombings employed by Sunni extremists, a terror strategy that reveals their desire to totally annihilate their enemies. It is not a surprise that the morgue is a dangerous place for Sunni families.

The scene at the gates of the health ministry is the alpha and the omega of the Iraqi civil war. The parking lot is packed with cars as Iraqis come from all around Baghdad and its outlying towns to search for bodies. By 10:15 the crowd has grown considerably to number close to a hundred. Some of the men are armed with pistols. One man who is tying a coffin to the roof of a minivan hides his face with a white cloth. White is a potent color in Iraq; it speaks of spiritual purity and a willingness to die. The cloth itself doubles as a mask to keep the stench of the corpse from coming through. The sight reminded me of the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf during the siege, where dead fighter after dead fighter was carried around the tomb of Ali on the shoulders of his friends, who radiated devotion and religious sacrifice. From one second to the next, it is impossible to know what will happen in this death-charged place.

Three days after the U.S. military killed the Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with a pair of well-placed 500-pound bombs near the village of Hibhib, his organization, al-Qaida in Iraq, launched a new offensive, including a mosque bombing, that claimed scores of lives in Baghdad. It was a sign that even if the leader was killed, the well-oiled mechanism of destruction was still running.

Baghdad in the early days of Nouri al-Maliki’s government is paralyzed by vehicle bans and long curfews and slipping under the waves of sectarian violence. The city, barricaded by Iraqi soldiers and Americans who man checkpoints at the entrances to each district, is being lost to bloodshed, not won. Neither the fledgling Iraqi state nor the U.S. military has been able to slow down the pace of sectarian killings, and it is clear to everyone who lives here that the authorities are fighting a holding action and not much more.

“I think there will be many more killings of Shiites,” a lightly bearded, middle-aged man named Ahmed told me in the restaurant of the Hamra hotel. “This is the time of revenge for al-Zarqawi.” Ahmed spoke with the calm precision of a former military officer. He had a strong allegiance to the Mahdi Army and a close family connection with Abu Dereh, a shadowy and infamous Shiite death squad leader I was researching. Abu Dereh was reportedly captured over the weekend by U.S. and Iraqi forces in a bloody raid in Sadr City, although local Iraqis claimed he escaped. Ahmed’s son-in-law worked for the death squad leader briefly, assisting with abductions before he was rotated out.

All sorts of rumors and myths circulate about Abu Dereh. One myth has him driving deep into Sunni-held territory in Anbar province and burning entire villages, while another says that he was a refugee of the great marshes in the south, and when Saddam drained them as punishment for the uprisings after the first gulf war, he fled to Sadr City, or Thawra as it was called. Abu Dereh, which means “father of shield” (“shield” is a proper noun in Arabic), is not his real name, it is a nom de guerre. Whenever it was uttered, the Baghdadi who hears it becomes serious and drops his voice so he could not be overheard.

Ahmed gave me an anonymous letter that on June 20 was distributed to seven Sunni mosques in Mansour, written in eloquent Arabic. The writer, a man who called himself Shalshal al Iraqi, titled his missive “The Reaper of al Rusafa.” The letter warned Sunnis living in the western half of Baghdad about Abu Dereh and the death squads that were moving through the city. In the letter, Shalshal al Iraqi accuses Abu Dereh of working directly for the Mahdi Army hierarchy. The first paragraph of the letter reads:

“His name is Abu Dereh and he is a professional killer who isn’t any less dangerous than al Zarqawi. Abu Dereh is a dangerous criminal who even the Interior Minister fears. Some of the Sadr City police work under his command and other forces from the Sayyid (Moqtada Sadr). Abu Dereh is a wild terrorist and dozens of killers prey behind him. Everyone in Sadr City knows this madman, but they don’t say his name, it is whispered in Sadr City when they wake up to the news of blindfolded dead bodies and bodies thrown out at al Seddeh, or on the junkyards of Qasra wah Atash, even in the sewers of Rustumiya, which the Interior Ministry officially made as a place for Abu Dereh’s victims. The bodies have been raked by claws.”

Ahmed confirmed that Abu Dereh is a Mahdi Army commander, but defended him, saying that he only targeted guilty people for interrogation, that the accusations in Shalshal al Iraqi’s letter were false. “He just takes Salafis,” Ahmed said, referring to the Sunni fundamentalists, including members of Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq movement, who espouse a fundamentalist return to the religion in the time of the Prophet and sanction the killing of Shiites. Shiites often refer to people involved in the mosque bombings in their parts of town as Salafis or Takfiris, but these terms are for the most part epithets, convenient labels used to justify the killing.

Muqtada al-Sadr is almost certainly aware of what is happening in Sadr City. Recently, one of Saddam’s defense lawyers, a man named Obeidi, was abducted from his house, bound and taken to Sadr City, where he was publicly executed and his body dumped in front of a portrait of Muqtada Sadr’s venerated father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. On the day I left Baghdad, June 23, clashes broke out between the Mahdi Army and Sunni groups, in a neighborhood battle that drew in U.S. attack helicopters and closed down the city entirely. It was the first sign of open conflict between the two sides in the new civil war, which has since begun raging out of control.

I met one of the victims of that civil war the day I went to talk to the Mahdi Army representative Rikabi. After I left the Sadr office, I drove for five minutes down Al Shu’ala’s dusty main street, and turned off onto a side road. Walking alone under the crucible sun in her black abaya was a woman of middle age carrying groceries. When I stopped the car to give her a ride, she climbed in, gave me a blessing, and immediately pulled out the death certificate for her son and began to weep. We had just turned off the main road onto an abandoned army base where half-constructed houses stood among piles of yellow bricks. This was Chikook, a squatters camp for Shiite families fleeing sectarian violence, managed by the Mahdi Army. Two police SUVs guarded the entrance, but I was able to drive straight through without being stopped. The woman, whose name was Leila Hassan Hammadi, directed me to her house, a section of the army barracks, and invited us to come inside to the cool dark of the house. A thousand dollars paid to someone she would not name had bought her two rooms, joined by a hole punched in the concrete wall. Hammadi’s three school-age daughters quietly materialized from behind a partition to bring out orange drink and bruised apples. Hassan, who is desperately poor, explained that her family had fled Taji, where some of the worst sectarian attacks have been.

“My son was only a child and they threw him in the trash,” Hammadi said, in a seizure of anguish. From a plastic bag where she kept her important papers, she took out postage-stamp-size pictures of her 18-year-old son Ali and her husband and handed them to me. “They kidnapped my husband.” When I asked who had killed her son and taken her husband, she said she didn’t know and was silent for a moment. “After they killed Ali, we received a letter at our house that said we had to leave in one week. It said if we see you a week from now, we will kill all of you. We didn’t leave. That’s when my husband was kidnapped.” The date on Ali’s death certificate was Nov. 6, 2005.

Hammadi and her daughters had been displaced for more than seven months. Without a man in the house, her only source of support was the Mahdi Army. Her refusal to describe the attackers is completely normal in Iraq. As I left, Hammadi begged for my help, for any contacts with human rights group that could support widows. “I am in a special situation,” she said. “Please.”

This is the second of three articles. Tomorrow: The investigation of the Mahdi Army’s death squads goes terribly wrong

On Tuesday, violence flared again, as suicide bombers detonated bombs across the street from the heavily-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad, killing as many as 16 people. Across Iraq, about 60 were killed, including 10 Shiites who were gunned down on a bus as it left for a funeral.

The killings are ominously similar to the “Black Saturday” massacre in December 1975 that helped precipitate the Lebanese civil war, when Christian Phalangist militiamen stopped 40 unsuspecting Muslims at a checkpoint in Beirut and cut their throats. In retaliation, Muslim militiamen set up their own checkpoint and slaughtered Christians.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appealed for calm, but the situation is beyond his ability to control. Sunni politicians accused Iraqi police of collaborating with the attacks, and said Iraq’s two key security ministries were also infiltrated. Iraq’s deputy prime minister for security affairs, Salam al-Zobaie, told Al-Jazeera, “Interior and Defense ministries are infiltrated, and there are officials who lead brigades who are involved in this.”

At the same time as the sectarian killings erupted, Maliki began his most serious attempt to rein in violent Shiite militias. On Friday, July 7, Iraqi troops joined Americans in raids in Baghdad’s vast Sadr City neighborhood, Sadr’s stronghold. U.S. helicopters and Iraqi troops engaged in a fierce battle, killing seven militiamen and wounding 34. According to news reports, the troops succeeded in capturing a dreaded Shiite commander named Abu Dereh. Dereh is closely linked to death squads that kidnap, torture and murder Iraqis who are accused of taking part in bombings of Shiite shrines. Sunni leaders have also accused him of being involved in the kidnapping of Taiseer al-Mashhadani, a Sunni lawmaker abducted on Saturday. U.S. officials said that Dereh was setting up a breakaway insurgent operation and was involved in smuggling weapons from Syria into Iraq.

Dereh is a shadowy figure who has deep connections with the Mahdi Army. A spokesman for the group, Abdel Hadi Al Darragi, has stated that Abu Dereh is not part of the Mahdi Army, but this is implausible. Anyone operating openly in Sadr City would almost certainly have at least tacit support from Sadr’s men. Sadr City is tightly controlled by the Mahdi Army and other groups are not allowed to operate there. For its part, the Mahdi Army condemned the joint American and Iraqi attack as a major escalation and disavowed knowledge of any death squad activities.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stated that he wants to bring the militia groups under the control of the government, but it is not clear how he will be able to control forces that have so deeply infected Iraqi institutions.

I recently left Baghdad after a month, my fourth assignment in Iraq. I was looking into the culture of revenge that has gripped the country, and the role played by militias like the Mahdi Army. Again and again, Abu Dereh’s name came up. So did a vacant lot at the edge of Sadr City called al-Seddeh.

Al-Seddeh is the place where the Mahdi Army dumps the bodies of the people it has killed. Iraqis have given it a macabre nickname: the “Happiness Hotel.” For months, the Baghdad police have regularly found bound corpses there, although it is likely that the victims were not killed at the site. The executions probably took place at a secret, improvised sharia (Islamic) court in Sadr City. Victims, usually buried in shallow graves, are always discovered bound and bearing signs of torture.

When I arrived in Baghdad on May 25, I looked out from my hotel across Jadriyah Boulevard. It was 2 in the morning and a dark reef of palms and blacked-out houses spread out like the edge of a dead continent. The moon lay in the center of the sky, shining dully through a shroud of dust. It was the only steady light now that the power had failed. Across the street there was the sound of a Kalashnikov. Someone was emptying an entire magazine at a target, and then after pausing to reload, unloaded a second clip for good measure. There was no answering rifle, no further information. A donkey woke and began to scream.

The Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias have filled a power vacuum in Iraq. With U.S. forces and the Iraqi government unable to prevent Sunni bombings that cause mass casualties, the militia group offers a measure of protection from such attacks and a means of retribution. The rise of sectarian militias represents a sea change in Iraqi society, one marked by a steady increase in the flow of corpses to the Baghdad morgue. Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that 40 people a day, not including bomb victims, were killed during the first four months of the year. But the true numbers are likely to be higher. Not all bodies make their pilgrimage to the morgue.

The mode of killing varies with the group and the area, but most of the bodies of victims are found in shallow graves in fields, or simply abandoned where they were executed.

“You know the difference between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni groups?” a young filmmaker named Haidar said recently. “The Mahdi Army bury the dead, and the Sunni militias throw them on the trash.”

The population of Baghdad is shifting as large numbers of urban Iraqis try to move to safe areas, or areas thought to be safe. I can now count half a dozen Iraqi friends who have already fled the country, and an equal number who are actively making plans to leave. Everyone in Baghdad seems to be on the run, or changing neighborhoods.

One of those who had to move was the manager of the storied Dulaime hotel. Sadiq al Dulaime has no connection to armed groups, and his family are all Baghdadis, very well known in the city. But he recently moved his wife and three young children into the hotel to avoid Shia militiamen on the road to his house. “When I asked my father what I could do for him, he told me, ‘What I want you to do is stay in the hotel, nothing more. That is what I want.’ The road is very bad now,” he said.

Dulaime is not alone. Other urban refugees have been turning up in the hotel complex, keeping quiet about their problems in the hope of not making them worse.

On June 9, a day after U.S. bombs killed the Jordanian head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Maliki’s government instituted a sweeping Baghdad security plan. But the crackdown only slowed the pace of bombings for a few days, a lull that might have been due to the mourning period for Zarqawi. Traffic moves at a perpetual crawl, and the simplest trips around Baghdad can take several hours. Meanwhile, new sections of the city in thrall to militia groups are becoming fundamentalist enclaves.

In Mansour, one of Baghdad’s upscale neighborhoods, a flier is circulating announcing that any man caught wearing jeans will be killed. “We used to see things like that under Saddam,” Ahmed D., a guitar-playing 19-year-old student whose parents are a mixed Sunni-Shiite couple, told me. Ahmed said the flier closely matched the threats the security services delivered under the old regime, and was written in the same style. “That’s why I think it’s the same people. If they caught a man wearing hair that was too long, they would beat him in the street. Those ideas of not wearing jeans and not wearing shorts, those are Saddam’s sick ideas, and they just wanted to keep people freaked out.” The violence under the old state was meant to intimidate, control the population through fear, and it bears a close resemblance to the information in the fliers distributed around Mansour.

In Mansour, it is now a crime for a woman to go out with her hair uncovered, and she can be publicly beaten for it. By contrast, in the vast slum of Sadr City, filled with impoverished and conservative Shiites from the countryside, such strictures are well known. In rich, mostly Sunni neighborhoods like Mansour it is a new development, but it also gives a clue about the nature of the insurgency and the current alliances. It is a natural metamorphosis for the former intelligence men, skilled in torture and abduction, to exchange the tyranny of Saddam’s regime for sectarian fanaticism. It merely requires a change of clothes.

Both sides in the sectarian conflict, if a simple binary division is possible in this country, now employ death squads, anonymous bands who abduct civilians, torture them until they make a confession, then stage executions. But the Sunni extremist groups, which include al-Qaida, are far more brutal and less discriminating in their violence. Their members regularly target places where Shiite civilians gather, in particular markets and mosques, using car bombs and suicide bombers to create daily scenes of massive carnage. Shiite groups have not as a general rule used these indiscriminate means.

One of the most disturbing developments in Iraq is that some ordinary Sunnis now support such mass attacks on civilians. A 30-year-old engineer, Aymen al Salihee, from the Saydiyah neighborhood, whom I have known for more than a year, became increasingly religious after making the hajj to Mecca. In a confused phone conversation, he told me, “You know, Zarqawi was a good man because he protected Sunnis.” Last year he had told me, “I hate the Shia. I hate them so much.” When I asked what they had ever done to him, he said, “Nothing.” The young man’s hatred is categorical, beyond reason.

Average Sunnis like Salihee give tacit support to the forces that target Shiites and Americans. Those forces consist of two distinct but increasingly indistinguishable groups: secular Baathists and fundamentalists. Ever since the fall of Baghdad, members of Saddam’s brutal security apparatus, the Mukhabarat, have expanded their networks — which were never really destroyed — and formed alliances with the fundamentalist groups, who are in turn funded by religious zealots from countries like Saudi Arabia. The old, secular insurgency of former Iraqi army officers has to a large degree been overtaken by the religious fighters and their constant stream of funds from abroad.

The result is a thoroughly efficient approach to creating a civil war, organized in part by the same people who were the state killers under the old regime. Zarqawi, the marketing genius who inspired so many jihadis with his call for the mass slaughter of Shiites, is now a ghost who hovers patiently, waiting for the day when the bloodletting becomes a flood tide.

Standing against the Sunnis, who make up only a fifth of Iraq’s population, are the Shiite militias and the Iraqi police. The two are sometimes hard to distinguish, in terms of both members and methods. In one notorious example, the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, was revealed to be running a secret facility that it used to torture prisoners. The police intelligence officials involved were linked to the Badr Brigade, another major Shiite militia. Militias also control the government prisons and the transportation ministry, and have serious leverage over some of Baghdad’s large hospitals.

Most of Iraq’s political parties have militias. Of the Shiite militias, the most powerful in Baghdad is the Mahdi Army. (The Badr Brigade — the armed wing of SCIRI, one of the two largest Shiite parties — is also potent, but its power base is in southern Iraq.) The Mahdi Army is a many-headed creature — fundamentalist religious movement, armed group and social welfare agency — that has been long underestimated by the United States. The militia leadership has quickly moved to set up its own sharia courts, where it has unquestioned authority. In the summer of 2004, the Sadr movement ran such a court in a small alley near the shrine, where clerics schooled in Islamic law would adjudicate and render decisions about small disputes and more serious cases. Now, in Sadr City, the Mahdi Army is again carrying out its own justice. And the Mahdi killings are not being carried out by rogue or undisciplined elements within the movement; they are a carefully orchestrated response to the attacks of Sunni extremists.

Observing the growing extent of militia influence in Baghdad, I decided to visit a Mahdi Army office to understand how its operations had changed.

On a white-hot day in early June, I went to the Shia neighborhood of al Shu’ala to speak to the Mahdi Army men who ran the neighborhood. The building was crowned with a new sign in English that read, “The Sadreen Institute for Strategic Studies,” suggesting a university of militiadom. As I arrived, 20 young men wearing the Mahdi uniform — black shirts and close-cropped hair — piled quickly out of late-model cars. As the entire Mahdi cell walked to the office in close formation, the men adjusted the pistols in their belts and pulled their shirts down to keep the guns out of sight. I waited at the door as the fighters were checked by the guard and were allowed into the office. One by one, as the office guard recognized the men, he gave them each a quick tap on the shoulder. A few minutes later, after the cell disappeared into the office, Hamdullah Rikabi, a Mahdi Army representative for Al Shu’ala, invited me in.

The Sadr office was packed with Iraqis asking for assistance with everything from ID cards to death payments to information about BKC machine guns. The Mahdi Army is doing a booming trade in community relations these days, and a citizen does not have to be a Shiite or even a Muslim to ask for their help. As uncounted numbers of Shiite families flee the extreme violence to “safe” neighborhoods, the Mahdi Army is welcoming a ready-made constituency of desperate and frightened people from all over Iraq.

“We respect all journalists and their opinions,” Rikabi told me warmly, before launching into a typical conspiracy-laden rant about how American soldiers were in league with Sunni extremists. “The American soldiers were behind the al-Askari shrine bombing, directly or indirectly. If they had allowed our guards to carry weapons, we could have stopped the attack. The American soldiers must leave Iraq immediately; this is what Sayyid Muqtada says.”

The thin and intense Rikabi was friendly even if his speech was pre-programmed. He went on to say that Mahdi Army soldiers were helping poor people, as I could see, and did not even carry weapons. This was an absurd and obvious falsehood, since nearly two dozen armed men had just entered the building. It is true that the militiamen were only carrying sidearms, and discreetly concealing them, but if the past is any guide, the larger-caliber material was cached close at hand. In Najaf, during the siege in 2004, the Mahdi Army leadership used a nearby religious school as an armory, and on the day the fighting ended, when Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s pilgrims flooded the city, the militia quietly disappeared with its entire stock of weapons.

The Najaf battle was a demonstration of faith that ended as a shattering military defeat for the young militia, but those awkward adolescent days are gone. Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers are more disciplined and have more public support than they did in the violent summer of 2004. But a trace of the old fervor remains, and I could hear an almost plaintive note in Rikabi’s accusation of U.S. complicity in the catastrophic bombing of the holy al-Askari shrine. The Mahdi militia has good reason to want the immediate departure of U.S. forces: They are the only power in Iraq they fear and cannot influence.

I wanted to understand how the Mahdi Army was responding to the attacks on Shiite civilians, a side of their movement they do not readily discuss with outsiders. A Shia contact in Baghdad made a telephone call and organized a meeting with a midlevel commander in charge of a number of smaller Mahdi cells. On June 6, I was instructed to wait at the Habaibna restaurant in Talbiyah, a mixed neighborhood known for bomb attacks.

Within five minutes of the scheduled appointment, two serious men in a BMW rolled up in the parking lot and told us to follow them. Instead of taking us back to Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold, we headed all the way back into town, to the Sunni neighborhood of Zayouna.

We arrived at the house of the Mahdi commander, Salman al-Darragi. The house was set back from the highway, on a street barricaded by palm logs and debris. A dozen Mahdi Army men, ranging in age from early 20s to 40s, gathered in the living room. A few were veterans of the street fighting in 2004. Everyone was ready to participate in the discussion, but they politely let Darragi speak first and listened quietly to our discussion.

The genial Darragi is well respected in the militia. His group makes money by running a propane gas franchise behind the house, part of the vibrant sectarian militia/business environment found in Baghdad these days. Darragi, who resembles an Iraqi Buddha, relaxed against the wall as one of his children brought in soft drinks. The young men, all fighters without weapons, came and sat on cushions against the wall and brought their difficulties to him. One young fighter complained that Iraqi police kept cutting in line for fuel at their gas station and it was causing problems. We did not talk about where Darragi got his fuel stock, but behind the house was a government gasoline tanker unhitched from its cab.

The Mahdi commander began our conversation by laying out a long and ridiculous conspiracy theory that involved American soldiers burying improvised explosive devices in Sadr City. But then he began to talk openly about the Mahdi Army’s military operations. This is highly unusual. It may have only happened because the political leadership in Sadr City had no idea Darragi was meeting with a reporter.

We were talking about Sunni groups that were targeting Shiite civilians when Darragi volunteered that the Mahdi Army in Sadr City was holding a man it believed had taken part in the bombing of the al-Sharoufi mosque a few months earlier. Darragi said, “We talked with him and he said that he worked with men to set off explosions. He is inside the jail now.” I asked what would happen to him. “If he is guilty of killing, then he must be killed. That is the sharia law. This man already confessed that he was killing people.” Darragi shrugged as if to say, “This is how it works, what can I do?”

Darragi went on to describe a secret court in Sadr City where the Mahdi Army held people it captured, tried them and passed sentence. When I asked to visit the sharia court and talk to the mosque bombing suspect, Darragi said, “I would have to blindfold you and that would be embarrassing for both of us. The court is in a secret place, but I will ask if it is possible.” When I called Darragi the next day, his phone was switched off. I tried to visit him a few days later but he was gone. One of his men said he was in Turkey.

Before I left Darragi’s house, the commander talked about his frustration with the current arms ban in Baghdad. Only the Army, the police and U.S. forces are allowed to carry arms on the street. “If I could bring my weapons I could go to al Rusafa [Baghdad east of the Tigris] and capture the terrorists who are building the bombs and sending them to this side of the city. Now, I can do nothing.” If the U.S. pressure was off Darragi and his men, it is a safe bet that there would be open conflict on the streets of Baghdad, this time not with the Americans, but between the Shia and the Sunni groups. As the recent bloodletting shows, the battle for the control of Iraq will be fought in these neighborhoods.

I decided to try another approach to get information about the secret court. After a few phone calls, I found a Shiite police source who was willing to meet near the hotel and talk about the situation with the Mahdi Army. Meeting in Sadr City was out of the question.

The police officer, Sgt. Jasim, was a well-groomed man in his 40s, clean-shaven except for a large mustache. He wanted to meet at a restaurant called Say Saban, a fancy garden place not far from the bomb-damaged Hamra hotel and the University of Baghdad. In more peaceful times, Say Saban is a restaurant that caters to families on a Friday night out. The place is like a miniature golf course surrounded by palm trees and tiny lakes, with a slightly unsettling and formal atmosphere. On the day we met, June 7, it was empty, except for Sgt. Jasim, his enormous, shiftless brother, and my driver and translator. Waiters hovered too closely around our table and the fixer who set up the meeting, Amar, continually looked around, afraid of being seen with a Westerner.

Sgt. Jasim worked in the police department in Sadr City. He said that he personally knew of many incidents where people were found killed at al-Seddeh. When I said that bodies had been found hanged, which suggested a judicial process, he said, “They aren’t hanging them now, they are killing them by suffocating them with electrical tape.” He illustrated the grim workings of the death squads with a grisly example.

“The Mahdi Army soldiers come in a convoy and put the victims in the trunk of the car. About a month ago, there was this guy they put in the trunk but they didn’t search him first, and this civilian happened to have a pistol on him. The Mahdi Army drove him to a place where he heard people being executed, and from inside the trunk he pulled his pistol out and shot himself.”

I asked what it was like to work as a police officer in Sadr City. He said, “Our job is to get rid of bodies and take them to the morgue. That is the only thing we do, day and night. On a quiet day we find five bodies.”

Jasim did not support the Mahdi Army. In fact, he was disgusted with them and seemed to hate his role as a corpse bearer. More than once, he said he wished that the U.S. military would intervene and stop the killings. After describing a massive protection racket Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers were running on the merchants in the Jamila market, he said, “Whenever an explosion goes off in Sadr City, the Mahdi Army brings three bodies to the place where it happened and they leave them there, saying, ‘Here, we are dealing with the terrorists, these people are responsible for the bombings.’ They don’t really deal with those responsible for the bombings, they just do whatever they want.”

The killings are a form of theatrical control, and this gruesome public display, in which brutal neighborhood thugs pose as Robin Hood’s merry band, sums up the Mahdi Army perfectly. They simultaneously want to appear virtuous and to scare the daylights out of anyone who might oppose them. It is a preview of how they will govern if they seize power. With each new mosque bombing and assassination it is easier to imagine the advent of maximum darkness, a future where no Sunni Arab family is safe and the entire society falls under the control of militia groups.

Over the lime sodas, Jasim suddenly fell silent and decided to leave Say Saban. Something had spooked him and it also had the fixer Amar about to jump out of his skin. Under his breath, Sgt. Jasim said he had seen someone he knew sitting nearby and wanted to move the meeting to another spot. No one wanted to be heard speaking English, so we paid and left. We decided to move the meeting down Jadriyah Boulevard, to a ratty, abandoned cafe near the Hamra. When we assembled in the back of the place, away from the street, I asked the officer for specific information about the sharia court that the Sadr official Darragi had alluded to in our interview.

“Yes, I know where it is. The court is in a school in Sector 30. The Mahdi Army takes their prisoners to the court where they obtain forced confessions. Then they kill them because they can’t let them walk out of there even if they are innocent.” I asked if he knew of anyone who had survived and could describe his experience. He shook his head.

Jasim said that U.S. forces had placed Abu Dereh on a target list and had tried to capture him in several raids, but had failed.

What about the police — could they intervene and stop the killing in Sadr City? Jasim vehemently insisted it was impossible. “No. They threaten us every minute. They [the militiamen] are not allowed to be arrested or brought up on charges.” Jasim accused a senior official in the Interior Ministry, Hussein Neuma, with covering up and protecting the militia members from prosecution. “He’s one of them,” Jasim said.

A few days after my meeting with Jasim, Ahmed, the student, told me, “The killings are becoming something that’s normal. When you hear about someone you know who has been killed, there’s a part inside of you that shakes. Now when I hear that someone I know has been killed, I don’t feel anything. It’s like a part of me has died.”

This is the first of three articles. Tomorrow: the daily nightmare at Baghdad’s morgue, and an encounter with a grieving woman who is sheltered by the Mahdi Army

On Tuesday, Aug. 2, walking carefully under the white-hot sun, a man carried a bag down Al Mutanabbi Street and walked into Hajji Qais Anni’s stationery store, stayed for a short time, then left without his package. When the package exploded a short time later, the blast killed Hajji Qais, who was sitting near the door where he kept watch over his shop. The bomb set fire to his place, and it is now a blackened shell on bookseller’s row.

Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him. He sold greeting cards for births and anniversaries along with Christmas and Easter gifts, cologne and pens. He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues. Aside from stocking a few items related to Christian holidays, there was nothing unusual in his shop. He wasn’t a known member of any political party, and he was, according to his neighbors on Al Mutanabbi Street, a generous man who often gave money to the poor.

No one in the district will speak openly about who killed him, including his own son.

Ahmed Dulaimi, a young guitarist for Iraq’s only heavy metal band, told a story that has been going around Baghdad these last few weeks. There was an ice seller selling ice from a small shop on the sidewalk in the Dora neighborhood. One hot day, a man came up to him with a gun and said, “You shouldn’t be selling ice because the Prophet Mohammed didn’t have ice in his time.” Then the gunman shot the ice seller dead. This story terrifies Iraqis but they often laugh when they recount it, because it is absurd that anyone would get killed for selling ice or shaving a beard. It is also true that the ice-seller anecdote follows a pattern of killings around the capital where Islamic militants have regularly assassinated Iraqis for violating strict, and utterly random, codes of behavior. The point of the ice-seller story is that now, anyone in Iraq can be killed for any reason at all. After Hajji Qais was killed, more than one person mentioned these spontaneous assassinations, and they spoke about them the way they’d describe a sandstorm, an all-encompassing thing that no one can stop.

Baghdad’s literary neighborhood has a long history of dissent and a well-practiced tolerance of other ideas. Under Saddam, Al Mutanabbi Street was a center for small anti-regime cells who published illegal copies of their tracts, under fake names. Because the place was known for intellectual resistance to the regime and as a center for liberal ideas, the government hated it. In the manic days after the fall of Baghdad, a flood of Western journalists came to Al Mutanabbi Street to meet dissident Iraqi writers, and in the cafes and shops there was always the excited roar of conversation. Men clinked their tea glasses on small cups, they gestured, hatched their schemes. English translation was a hot commodity in those early days. I was at the Shabandar cafe in May 2003 when Amir Sayegh, an Iraqi Christian, came over and told me how he worshiped Sidney Sheldon over Joyce and Faulkner as the greatest writer to ever write in English; he had no use for the literary canon, but he took writers in and made them part of the neighborhood.

Amir hatched a million schemes for post-Saddam Iraq. He wrote long advisory letters to President Bush, and he wanted to start an English instruction school for adults, which was reasonable and nearly succeeded. Amir explained to any captive listener that he was working on a manuscript that tracked Baghdad’s exploding inventory of graffiti. “Saddam is coming back,” he had copied down from a dust-colored wall in the old city right after Baghdad fell. Beneath it was the response, “Yes, but he’s coming back through your ass.” By June of last year, he had more than 3,000 quotations from the street and he was carefully adding new quotes to his archive. The same walls were rewritten, edited by anonymous authors, the graffiti turning against the U.S. When I left in September 2004, he was kind enough to give me a copy. Amir, compulsive chatterer, couldn’t stop talking because he had years of unborn commentary stored for the exact moment when the regime collapsed. When the time had finally come, it was almost more than he could bear. It was Amir, Socratic in his ugliness, ex-radar technician, dissident spokesman, who believed Iraq could survive the occupation to scatter the ashes of the dictatorship.

“This is the real parliament of Iraq,” a Shabandar dweller exhorted after the invasion. “This is where the real discussions take place.” If the Shabandar was Iraq’s parliament, then al-Sayegh was its prime minister. If you were a writer in Baghdad, it did not matter where you came from, you ended up at the Shabandar, because the cafe and the book district received everyone. Amir would find you there. If you were a thief, then your stoop was in Bab Al Sharji. For literary types, it was Al Mutanabbi Street. There happens to be a great symmetry in Arabic that binds the words for “writer” and “book” in a single sound. Book is “kitab,” writer, “katib,” and the difference is little more than a shift in stress when the words are spoken.

Today, the street where books and writers coexist has become a street of ghosts. After I returned to Iraq in late May this year, I learned that Amir Sayegh had fled to Canada.

Iraqis still shop in the book district, but most of the intellectuals who felt free to say what they thought in public are either in hiding or have fallen silent out of fear that spies for various armed groups will target them for assassination. Iraqi writers are starting to head underground, retreating to protected offices. Because literary culture is so bound to a particular neighborhood of Baghdad, an attack on Al Mutanabbi Street is an attack on Iraqi culture itself. This is a culture once so vibrant that a famous slogan in the Arab world ran, “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads.”

A mere two and a half years after I met Amir, not a trace of his optimism remains, and in the district where they were once welcomed, many Iraqis shun foreigners. It is extremely dangerous to openly associate with Westerners, particularly Americans, since doing so can lead one to be denounced as a traitor by an insurgent group. No one wants to be the ice seller. Other Iraqis, who have had family members killed in the uprisings that spread across the country, have moved toward the insurgents or joined them. Those left in the middle, those who have no bad feelings about foreigners, are in a vanishing minority. Trust, always hard to find in Iraq, is extremely rare. This is a sea change, a shift evident in the hard looks and hesitant hand-shakes when we meet people in passing. Foreigners in Iraq experience this social breakdown in a direct way, but Iraqis suffer on a far more intense level. They face exactly the same threats, the evaporation of trust, the ever-present danger of kidnapping and assassination, but they do not have the option of going home to another country. The old ties that bound Iraqis to each other are coming apart.

In the intervening time since the fall of Baghdad, a vast thieves’ market of looted machinery, drugs and other illegal business has swallowed Al Rasheed Street, the long once-elegant old boulevard that runs along the Tigris, sending tentacles down into the busy book district. Al Rasheed Street has a long colonnaded stretch that is now closed to traffic while lookouts for armed groups keep a close eye on strangers in the market. Everyone is suspicious and everyone is monitored.

When I first heard about Hajji Qais’ death, I was searching for a friend I made in the early days of the occupation, an Iraqi writer named Hamid Mokhtar, who spends a great deal of time on Al Mutanabbi Street. Ahmed Dulaimi went looking for him on Friday the 5th of August but there was no sign of Mokhtar and he found only nervous booksellers and the Shabandar cafe shuttered. The Shabandar is always open, even during Ramadan, and this was another bad sign. What started as a search for a writer became a search for a neighborhood.

A few days later, when I finally met Mokhtar at the Iraqi Writer’s Union and told him about the bombing on the bookseller’s row, he was not surprised. He had already heard the news and said without any hesitation, “We are all targets for assassination now.” Mokhtar, who is well known in Iraq for spending eight years in Abu Ghraib during Saddam’s regime, knows the feeling well. While other writers cooperated with the previous government, Mokhtar was one of a small number of intellectuals who continued to work without producing the obligatory paeans for the dictator. Eventually, security men came to his house and arrested his typewriter, and finding that unsatisfactory, eventually returned for the man himself. These days, rail-thin but looking much healthier than he did after his release from prison, the soft-spoken Mokhtar argues for religious tolerance and national unity. In Iraq, now a crucible for at two distinct fundamentalist movements, the act of publicly advocating these principles in Baghdad is flat-out heroic.

“When I appear on television and in magazines, that brings me to the attention of these [armed] groups. Many of my friends have been killed, even my colleagues from prison have been targeted. Before, we were suffering under Saddam, but now there are many Saddams.” In the aftermath of the occupation, those loyal to any one of the numerous armed politico-religious gangs are indistinguishable from anyone else in Iraq. The threat is invisible.

Mokhtar is finding himself, along with the other writers who experienced a sudden shock of freedom, under some of the same unpleasant pressures he felt under the regime. Writers and intellectuals are being driven back underground or, at the very least, stymied by the uncertainty and fear of reprisals for advocating forbidden ideas, and an idea acceptable to one faction is heresy to another. Sayegh and Mokhtar’s longtime enemy has returned not as a single tyrant, but instead as a creature the occupation has atomized into thousands of gunmen amped on pure hatred and fundamentalist Islam.

“In Saddam’s time I only had one enemy, the dictator; now it is not very clear. He’s disappeared. Saddam has become a ghost, he could be anywhere, ” Mokhtar explained with a shrug.

“Mutanabbi Street is the place where we express our ideas. We don’t have any other place to go and many of the famous Iraqi writers have fled the country. The only way to communicate with them is through the Internet. The others are afraid and they are hiding. I’ve been advised not to go out in public.” Mokhtar said that his old car was easily spotted on the road, so he got a new one that doesn’t stand out quite as much.

On the following Wednesday, five days after I met Mokhtar at his office, I took Ahmed down to Al Mutanabbi Street. We found the Shabandar open. There were a few younger men sitting on the benches keeping an eye on the clientele and they had beards, a new development for the Shabandar. These are newcomers, who come to keep watch on the smokers and tea drinkers. Out in front of the great windows, sitting behind Hajji Mohammed, the owner of the place, is a scribe for those who need to write official letters but do not know how to write. The old man is curled over an ancient Arabic typewriter with a piece of yellowed paper wound through the platen. It looks like he’s been there for a hundred years.

In the Shabandar, Ahmed was sitting next to me trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.

“You want me to go ask the owner, Hajji Mohammed, about the bombing?”

“No.”

“OK. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

Ahmed waited for more information. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said, “Hate the Game, not the Player.”

“I just want to sit here and let these guys get used to us for a minute.”

There were warning signs. No one spoke in the cafe, and most of the customers were smoking in silence; if they did speak, they kept their voices low so they wouldn’t be overheard. Men sitting on benches across the cafe looked away when we glanced in their direction. People were monitoring us, a few were waiting to see what would happen, keeping an iron in the fire with respect to possible future events. When we’d come in, I had seen a man in his 30s wearing a particular kind of beard that the jihadis favor. He was reading a paper and made a show of not looking up. Fighters in the Mahdi Army wear this beard. It also didn’t have to mean anything, although those beards were not common two years ago. We sat down next to him.

“Ahmed, look at this guy next to us.”

“Sure, man, I see him, no problem.” Ahmed speaks in perfect American movie English.

“Ask him about the bombing on Tuesday that killed Hajji Qais.”

So Ahmed turned to the man and asked him.

“I know you guys are from the press,” the man with the beard whispered. “You are asking very sensitive questions. If you ask Hajji Mohammed about it he might suspect you of something.” The man with the beard didn’t feel like talking about the bombing. We went to the front of the cafe and found Hajji Mohammed, who is slightly grizzled and irritable, stuck behind his small desk where he rings up the customers. When we asked him about the bombing he said that he couldn’t remember a time when people were killed for absolutely no reason. Hajji Mohammed went on to speak wistfully about the old monarchy, saying Iraq had its best days under the king. We asked him why he’d closed the cafe last Friday on its busiest day of the week.

“Fridays I lose so much money because people buy a tea and sit all day and when it comes time to pay, they come to me and lie about how many teas they had. So I closed the cafe. We also had generator problems,” Hajji Mohammed said. It was a massive lie, which he did not expect us to believe. Fridays are the busiest day for the Shabandar, the day that writers from all over the city come to discuss, translate and work on manuscripts; business booms. Mokhtar also makes a point of being at the Shabandar on Friday where he holds court. The real reason Hajji Mohammed closed the cafe, which everyone on the street knows, is that he has been receiving threats from insurgent groups who don’t like his clients and their politics. Mokhtar is likely one of the reasons, and there are other dissident groups as well. We would find one such semi-clandestine organization two days later and they would confirm that the Shabandar was receiving threats, but they couldn’t say who was behind them. The men never show themselves.

We left the Shabandar and found a man around the corner who said that Hajji Qais’ son was not killed in the bombing, and only found out about his father’s death on television. He said that Ahmed Qais was working around the corner in another small stationery store, called the Nadeem. The bookseller said we could talk to him if we were interested.

Hajji Qais’ son, Ahmed Qais, is in his early 30s, a well-educated Sunni engineer. He’s clean-shaven and polite, not an extremist. Ahmed Qais is a little heavy-set from consuming sugary tea and bread. He’s well-spoken in Arabic, and he understood a great deal of spoken English, often responding before the translation came in. For a man whose father had been killed a few days before, Ahmed Qais was pretty calm and focused. It took a little while to convince him to talk to a reporter but he relented after a few minutes. We found a room in the back of the stationery store where we could talk.

“Who do you think killed your father?” I asked him. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“Everything is suspected. He worked all day and all night, so there’s no way he could be involved in something. The police came and conducted a short investigation and then left, but in a destroyed country like this, they can’t investigate anything. There are also some strange people here who think that my father was selling valuables or Easter gifts and some people think that might be the wrong thing to do.”

Ahmed Qais talked for an hour about how it was important for his family to move on with their lives, which seemed like an odd comment to make so soon after the killing. Ahmed Qais didn’t back any particular theory of the crime. In fact, he stayed away from saying anything specific and wouldn’t name anyone he thought was involved. He was obviously extremely frightened and thought that talking about the assassination of his father would only bring him problems. Ahmed Qais asked if I heard what happened to the ice seller in Dora and we said yes, that story was going around and we knew it. I asked him about threats his father might have received and he said that there weren’t any, that his father didn’t have enemies on the street.

Just as I was leaving, I handed him a piece of paper with my contact information on it. He said, “Even if I had some information, I would keep it to myself.” Ahmed Qais told me that he had two families to support and that it was a big responsibility.

“We should just forget it,” he said.

I was stunned. “Forget the killing?”

“Yes.”

Hajji Qais Anni had only been dead for six days. His blackened store is a monument to the assassination and also a warning to other Al Mutanabbi Street vendors. On Sunday, three days before I met his son, another man selling cassette tapes of the Quran was assassinated by gunmen. He worked in a store a block away from Hajji Qais’ place.

Two days later, on Friday, in the faint hope of finding the Shabandar open, we went back to Al Mutanabbi Street to meet Hamid Mokhtar, but the cafe was shuttered. The street was filled with booksellers and book buyers. At 10 in the morning, it was 115 degrees, while street vendors yelled out, “Drinks! Cold! Drinks! Pepsi! Miranda!” It was hard to move in the crowd. There were hundreds of men in the street shopping for books spread out on carpets, buying religious tracts, technical manuals. Copies of pirated software were placed respectfully by ornately bound Qurans.

We found Mokhtar waiting in front of the Shabandar. He said, “We can’t stay here.” So we walked to a bookstore called Adnan’s Library where we drank tea, while Mokhtar scouted for a safe place. He led us through winding streets below Al Rasheed Street, small alleys that branched off Al Mutanabbi, narrow canyons whose walls were white in the sun. Mokhtar was worried that we would be attacked; he’d taken this route many times before, trying to ditch the Mukhabarat (secret police) men in the old regime days. On Rasheed Street, there is a dark pit of a place called Hassan the Foreigner. Men who couldn’t get into the Shabandar were there drinking tea and smoking. Students worked at a nearby table taking careful notes. It was impossible to see what they were working on. The place was ancient, unimprovable and collapsing down into itself in slow motion. A faint rectangle of light came through the windows and died long before the back wall where we found a free bench.

“I discovered that a girl I knew from college was writing reports on me [for the secret police]. I was surprised but this gave me an idea for a new book.” I asked him if he was able to write these days. Mokhtar got upset with the question. “No, I can’t write under these conditions, I have to calm down. I need some time to think. It’s too soon.” Like all other Iraqis, Mokhtar has been pushed into the rapidly splintering future without time to cope with the past.

As he was talking, other middle-aged men gathered around us very quietly and sat down after long ritual greetings. They were all poets and former political prisoners; they were all Mokhtar’s friends. All the prison men are the same. They talk about prison, how they survived, and they carry pictures of those days like wedding photos. In the photos, taken on the special occasions when their families were allowed to visit, they are hunched in groups and hollow-eyed. Prisoners form tight-knit groups and the photographs showed the circle of men whom Mokhtar trusted. It is a special honor to see these pictures. Mokhtar carries them with him. We were being allowed inside Mokhtar’s cell.

One of Mokhtar’s friends, a poet, leaned over and said to me, “I have some information. The Shabandar is closed because it got a threat.”

“From who?”

“Nobody knows.”

The man was going slowly blind from cataracts. He wanted to know where he could go for treatment. “I am a writer. Without my eyes, what can I do?” he asked.

We talked and drank tea until a loud man sidled up from nowhere. I never even saw him coming. He was a loud Arab-American from Indiana in a business-casual shirt who said he worked with the International Republican Institute. (IRI states that no one fitting that description has ever worked with its organization.) We got into a conversation about what he was doing, none of which made a great deal of sense, and then he explained I couldn’t write any of his information because he doesn’t want to be targeted by the resistance. The Indiana man also said all these things at the top of his lungs in English in the depths of a cafe that the insurgents control or at least monitor. It was a terrible mistake in Hassan the Foreigner and there was nothing you could tell him. Mokhtar looked over at me with suffering eyes and left for another appointment.

Minka Nijhuis, a brilliant Dutch journalist, was sitting next to me and said we should go look for some people who she thought might know more about the bombing and the threats to the cafe. It was also safer to keep moving.

We walked out into the crucible sun and found the bookseller street deserted, the vendors packing up. A dwarf passed by us pushing a handcart full of empty boxes.

Minka’s contacts were members of a secular pro-democracy group called the Cultural Gathering. We walked to the end of Al Mutanabbi. Next to a covered market stood a large building with a courtyard. Inside the courtyard were men selling books and pamphlets on tables. The second floor had piles of dead copiers, a graveyard for dead office equipment. We walked to the gates, where Minka spoke to a man who asked us to wait for a moment. That was when we realized that the group was using observers, who made sure that no one who didn’t belong there could get through the gates. If there was a problem, one of the men would run to the group and tell them to scatter. The office is deep off the courtyard, so controlling the gates is not difficult.

Men on the street selling cigarettes, soft drink salesmen, and other people who stay in one place for long periods of time often work as lookouts for underground groups in Iraq. You see it everywhere. The Cultural Gathering was worried about being attacked by insurgents and they had their eyes open.

The leader of the Iraqi Cultural Gathering emerged from the courtyard to greet us, blinking in the harsh light. His name was Mohammed Shakir Mahmoud, and he was happy to see journalists because he wanted to talk about his work and there weren’t any foreigners coming around to listen.

In a small, dusty office with a computer and a few chairs, Mahmoud said, “We have the idea that every aspect of Iraqi culture was damaged by the dictatorship, that’s why we should rebuild the culture and bring attention back to Iraqi civilization. In the past there was a great deal of damage. We were isolated and alienated from each other. That’s why we created this organization.”

The organization puts out a journal of essays on democracy and Iraqi civilization, where they promote the values of a secular unified country. Mahmoud was not enthusiastic about religion as the basis of government; he thought the federalism expressed in the draft of the constitution was a simple power grab by armed factions. Four other men quietly came into the room to join the discussion, sat down on the chairs and listened while Mahmoud, who works as a newspaper editor, explained what they were trying to do.

“We organized meetings in the Shabandar of writers who had been forced to leave Iraq during Saddam’s time. Our basic idea is that Iraqis should understand themselves.” Mahmoud’s haven in the Shabandar lasted for two meetings and that was it. After that, Hajji Mohammed told them they weren’t welcome, that they were causing trouble because he’d been getting threats from insurgent groups. Mahmoud, whose group has about 120 unofficial members, discussed the Iraqi national identity over tea with his friends. Islam and its effect on civilization was the topic of the second, a subject that may have pushed Hajji Mohammed at the Shabandar over the edge. Thinkers who advocate a secular Iraq are being driven slowly underground because their ideas are a threat to the religious fundamentalists in each armed group.

Jarrar Hassan, a forthright middle-aged man who was sitting next to Mahmoud, said, “Hajji Mohammed thinks the threats have something to do with our meetings. I spoke to him and he told me what happened because we have a good relationship. He said, ‘If you guys came on Fridays then someone will drop off a bomb and kill all of you. So I closed the cafe.’”

Minka said, “So you are the troublemakers.”

“We are honored to be so,” Mahmoud laughed. “We are still a small organization. We can’t do much. We have no public membership lists and we have not been threatened individually, but as a group we have been accused of being spies for the U.S. and accused of apostasy. In the newspaper, people printed direct threats against us.”

As we were leaving, Mahmoud gave us a copy of the Iraqi Cultural Gathering Journal to take with us. It was difficult to leave the men there. They looked stranded and uncertain about the future. We started to make our way out. In the hall, we passed the carefully stationed lookouts, and as we walked by, each serious young man joined the group and walked with us down to the street. Not one of them carried a gun.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

As Salihee approached the patrol from the east, another car was turning around in front of him. He began to drive around it to the right. Exactly what happened next is in dispute. What is certain is that as Salihee went around the car, the two U.S. snipers, thinking he was a suicide bomber, opened fire. At least four rounds were fired. One blew out the car’s right front tire; another ricocheted off the ground and pierced the gas tank. The final 7.62 millimeter round pierced the driver’s side of the windshield, entering Salihee’s right eye and shattering his skull. Salihee died instantly.

The American troops left the car in the street and moved to a different position. An hour after the shooting, an Iraqi policeman found Salihee’s phone and called his wife, Raghad. Raghad arrived at the scene and found her husband’s body still slumped in the car, and she called an ambulance. Then she sat down on the curb and wept.

Salihee was not a suicide bomber. He was a physician and journalist who was going to his house on his day off to pick up his 2-year-old daughter, Dania, and take her swimming. Barely able to make ends meet on the meager salary paid doctors by the Iraqi Health Ministry, Salihee had talked his way into a reporting job at Knight-Ridder in early 2004. He earned bylines in the San Jose Mercury News and other major U.S. papers by writing about detainees who had been tortured by Iraqi police and the dangers faced by men driving alone in the city. After his death, anguished tributes from colleagues and friends flooded the Internet and the papers, even NPR.

I first met Yasser Salihee in May, through his younger brother, Ayman, who works as my interpreter. Whenever Ayman needed a contact or a piece of advice, he called his older brother for the answer, which meant they were on the phone all the time. They were very close, and it wasn’t long before I met Yasser, who wanted to help on an investigative story. Over the course of a few weeks, we grew to be friends as we worked to find leads and uncover the past of the main subject, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Yasser worked in his off-hours to find leads and would show up at the hotel with his latest haul of phone numbers and ideas. In his rimless glasses and perfectly pressed shirt, Yasser came across more as a scientist than a reporter. He was a man with a great deal of curiosity and respect for facts. He also had no problem telling me what to do. Once, when he thought I needed a haircut, he sent the barber to my hotel room so there would be no escape.

In early June, Yasser stopped by and we talked about what he was going to do after his stint as a journalist. I said he shouldn’t give up on it, that Iraq needed reporters. “Yeah, but this isn’t going to last forever,” Yasser said.

Three weeks after that conversation, just after I returned from a trip to Fallujah, Ayman called and said that his brother had been shot and killed by U.S. soldiers. Ayman was in shock. I felt revulsion toward the soldiers, a sense of betrayal. At the end of the conversation he told me, “Don’t worry, you are still my brother. Don’t worry.” He wanted me to know we were still friends despite his shattered trust in the U.S. Later on he would say, “You don’t know what I’m feeling,” and it was true. There weren’t words for it.

A few days after Ayman told me about Yasser’s death, I decided to search for the soldier who pulled the trigger and look for answers about the shooting. I wanted to hear what happened in the soldier’s own words. The story presented a serious difficulty: I could not tell the U.S. military that I was working on Salihee’s killing: Third Infantry Division Public Affairs officers will not help a reporter who is working on a “negative” report about civilian casualties, and one such officer told me as much. To date, the U.S. military has refused to release any figures about the civilians it has killed, although it keeps very detailed records of every incident.

So I requested an embed slot in western Baghdad without mentioning the killing and hoped to find the soldiers involved by tracking down which unit was at the intersection of Amel Al Shabi and Rafaee streets. Two weeks later, after a lucky break, I was able to find the unit and the man who fired the fatal shot. To increase the chances of finding the soldier, I asked to embed with the company that patrolled the area, part of the 256th Brigade Combat Team. It was a matter of knowing which unit identifying numbers were on the vehicles in the neighborhood and making a rough guess whom to embed with. Ayman and I visited the intersection where the shooting occurred so I could see it and talk to eyewitnesses. The street is full of people, mostly men selling bread or hardware. It’s a busy commercial district that borders a major artery in the western sector of the city, and an easy place to recognize.

A day after I started the embed with the company in Amariyah, I was riding in a Humvee taking a tour of the neighborhood, when we suddenly turned down Rafaee street and then turned right on Amel Al Shabi, the same intersection where Salihee was killed. The patrol had gone over the exact spot, so there was no doubt that this was not only the right company, but the same platoon. Not long after that, a number of soldiers in the company came forward to tell me that they were nearby when Salihee was shot. I also knew from Ayman that snipers had fired on Salihee’s car, so it came down to asking a young specialist from Louisiana who the snipers were in the unit. As we talked in his room and looked at video his buddies had shot during their tour in Iraq, the specialist gave me two names. One of the men worked in the company headquarters, the other sniper was still going on patrols. The next night, the 13th of July, I walked into the command post after dinner and recognized one of the men the young soldier had mentioned. The man was working on a notebook computer at a big table in the front room of the command post. We struck up a conversation.

A sniper with the 256th Brigade Combat Team.

The sniper was working the night shift at the command post. He was a tall, good-looking man who didn’t have trouble getting girls back home. He showed me photographs on his computer, describing them in a deep Southern baritone. It was late and there weren’t a lot of people around at that time of the night. Radios chirped and hissed in the next room with traffic from the patrols outside the wire as they made their way through the neighborhoods of western Baghdad. Satellite maps of the capital marked “SECRET” covered the walls of the trailer. It was a quiet night, and there were no roadside bombs or rocket attacks as the patrols called in their positions.

The soldier showed a picture of himself kneeling on the ground, surrounded by Iraqi men who were giving the camera the thumbs up. One of the young cousins was throwing a gang sign, his fingers spread out in a sideways “V.” The men were smiling. One of the older brothers had his hand on the sniper’s shoulder. In the foreground, laid out in front of the American, was his trophy, a dead fox.

The sniper explained to me that he had befriended the Shiite family in the photograph while his unit spent some days near the town of Taji. He was ordered to watch a road and posted on their roof. “They were so respectful and wanted to learn things about us, and learn about our culture. It was like we were very important people, stopping in at their house,” he said with some amazement. It was one of his happiest memories of Iraq.

“On our last day at that position, while we were waiting to be extracted after midnight, we were sitting with the father, sons and cousins. Then the old man looked out and saw a fox near his chickens. I looked through my night vision system and saw the fox on a roof on the far side of a courtyard. The father said, ‘Would you mind shooting the animal that is killing our chickens?’ I said, ‘Not a problem.’ So I fired and it disappeared, but they didn’t believe I hit it. I told the kid to go out and see for himself and he went out there and came back with the fox, smiling. The old man was so happy.”

The sniper said he wanted to go back to see how the family was doing, but the unit changed locations and he couldn’t keep his promise to return. He brought up more photographs of his sniper positions, and told me he could hit a quarter at 300 meters. It is a distance of nearly a thousand feet. The sniper also told me his first name was Joe.

Back home, Joe hunts white-tailed deer with a bow and arrows he carves out of cedar shafts. “You have to know how to stand,” he said. “You only have 20 yards.” Like most of the men in his unit who are from the deep South, he can talk about the woods for hours, and his descriptions of his favorite places are unusually vivid, but the world beyond the forests and bayous, the chain of command and military politics, makes him uncomfortable. In the war zone, Joe remains close to the noncommissioned officers he trusts and avoids officers as much as he can. Joe is the son of a fighter pilot who died a year after he returned from Vietnam. There have been soldiers in his family for generations. When he started talking, I could see that he was struggling to make sense of his experiences in Iraq.

Joe went through the pictures on his laptop one by one, talking about near misses where his hiding place was nearly discovered, and the hot days where he had to lie perfectly still while Iraqis walked a few feet away from his position.

We looked at photographs of Joe crouching in fields, surrounded by tall grass where he can barely be distinguished in his camouflage suit. In many of the shots, he’s flipping off the camera. “That’s just something we do,” he told me. “I don’t think you can use any of those pictures,” he said and laughed.

Then he brought up a photograph of a white Daewoo Espero sedan on a Baghdad street. The sedan had a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield. Behind the wheel there was a lifeless man, slumped in the seat with a shattered skull and a torrent of blood staining his shirt. The image carried a sudden shock of recognition and despair. The dead man behind the wheel of the car was my friend and colleague, Yasser Salihee.

The sniper lowered his voice when he talked about the pictures of the car and the man inside it. His self-assured manner disappeared and he became nervous. “Here is one of ours. I really hope he was a bad guy. Do you know anything about him?” Then he said, “See, I don’t know if I should be talking about this.”

“Did you fire the shot that killed him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

Joe said that it was true that he fired the shot through the Espero’s windshield, but he wasn’t positive if it was the lethal shot. There was no doubt that it was, but Joe seemed to be genuinely uncertain about it. It was clear that he did not want it to be true.

The next day, I asked Joe if I could interview him about what happened that day. He agreed, but asked me not to use his full name because he was afraid of retribution in the United States. “I don’t want someone coming after me,” he said. I did not reveal that I’d been looking for him for two weeks.

The day after I looked at the photos on Joe’s laptop, I went out with his platoon on a patrol in Amariyah. It was July 14 and it was 125 degrees. Within a few minutes we were drenched with sweat. “This is a perfect place for a vee-bid,” the platoon sergeant said as he stood outside the concertina wire on a busy street. (For security reasons, none of the soldiers involved will be named.) He was halfway through handing out a thousand frozen chickens in a part of the city that has been flooded by refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi. It was not a good place to stand on the street for longer than a few minutes and no one wanted to be there. “Vee-bid” is U.S. slang for a Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device, a weapon otherwise known as a car bomb, which insurgents prefer to use against U.S. forces because there is no defense against it. The armor on Humvees will not stop the force of a blast fueled by artillery shells and anti-tank mines. Whenever soldiers talk about vee-bids, their sense of dread comes through.

The soldiers were not enthusiastic about giving the chickens away. One man called it “Operation Chicken Choker” because he didn’t want to be blown up giving food to people who were sympathetic to the insurgents. It was easy to see what he was talking about. Amariyah, which is mostly a Sunni neighborhood, was home to high-level military officers for the previous regime, and many of them have fled to Jordan and Syria where they provide funds for the insurgency. There is a constant sputter of gunfire in Amariyah. If it’s not coming right down on the soldiers, they barely look up.

The platoon managed to finish the mission in 45 minutes, throwing the chickens in careful arcs to the sergeant, who relayed them gracefully to the surprised passengers of passing cars. The platoon had been waiting for the chickens for hours because they had been stuck on the highway behind a roadside bomb, and when they were finally gone, there was a sense of relief. Knowing the intensity of violence in Amariyah, sending soldiers to deliver frozen chickens in the insurgent-controlled neighborhood seemed insane.

In the evening, I went back to the company headquarters to look for Joe, who was working the night shift again. We had trouble finding a good place for the interview because people kept coming through the trailer. We eventually ended up in the first sergeant’s office and closed the door. After a few minutes, I told Joe that I did know Salihee, that he was a friend, and that I wanted to hear his side of what happened. I asked him to go over the events of that day.

His answers didn’t come out in a linear chronology. Instead, Joe went back and forth over the same stretch of time, describing the block where the killing happened, trying to explain what it was like to drive down that street. The American names for the crossroads where Salihee died, Screaming Lady and Cedars, came up many times when he talked about attacks on the soldiers. “We’ve had a lot of problems right there from Cedars at the intersection with Screaming Lady — that is the worst part of our sector is right there,” Joe said. It is a place where soldiers from Joe’s company regularly come under small-arms fire and sniper attacks. The day before Salihee was killed, an insurgent sniper had shot and critically wounded a soldier in Joe’s platoon named Root, less than 300 feet from the intersection. On the 24th of June, Joe and his spotter were sent out with the platoon as a counter-sniper team.

Not long after the patrol entered the area, someone spotted a man on the roof of the four-story building at the corner of Amel Al Shabi, and the platoon moved in immediately for a search, while Joe and the spotter stayed down on the street to provide security. Joe also said that the platoon was taking small-arms fire in the neighborhood and that they had to move from cover to cover to reach their final position at the intersection. This is when two cars approached the U.S. snipers, with Salihee behind the wheel of the second. I asked him to describe the moment he started firing at Salihee’s car.

“I was shooting to disable when he swerved around the other car. He was going more than 20 miles an hour. We aren’t used to seeing someone drive that fast.” I wanted to know if Salihee had time to react, if he had time to stop. The car turning around in front of Salihee could have obscured his vision of the American patrol ahead. Joe said, “He had to have seen us, he had to have. I was standing in the middle of the road. I made eye contact with him after the warning shots. I thought, Oh my God it’s a vee-bid, we’re done.” Joe said he was firing from a standing position and that he had moved out into the street to stop Salihee. “I fired the first warning shot at 150 meters and the last shot at 20 or 30 meters. His hands never went up. It looked like he was ducking behind the steering wheel at 70 or 80 meters. It looked like there was a small silhouette of his head.” Joe said that Salihee didn’t respond to the warning shots, that he didn’t slow down.

When I asked Joe about the total elapsed time between the warning shots and the lethal shot he said, “The total elapsed time was 6 or 7 seconds.” When Joe talked about his decision to fire at Salihee, he sounded anguished, but he kept coming back to the moment when Salihee passed the first car, the moment he decided that Salihee was a bomber attacking the U.S. position.

Two Iraqi eyewitnesses contradicted Joe’s account. Falah Hassan Jasim, a plumber who was standing on the south side of the street when the shooting happened, told me, “There was a Lada car turning in the road and he [Salihee] tried to pass it, and then he pulled over. The Americans shot him, they were standing in the middle of the street.” According to Hassan, Salihee was stopped with his hands up when the snipers fired at him. I asked Hassan about the interval between the shots and he said, “It was like this, pop, pop, pop,” saying the bullets were fired in less than a few seconds.

Another witness, Hamid Mohammed Aboud, a 25-year-old ice seller who works at the corner of Amel Al Shabi and Rafaee streets, said, “Both Americans were firing at the same time, the shots were very close together.” When the shooting started, the ice seller said he ran to seek shelter in a nearby store. “I am talking about this because I might be in the same place one day.”

Was Salihee’s car stopped? There does not appear to be definitive proof one way or the other. Ayman Salihee, Yasser’s younger brother, said that when he arrived at the intersection, he saw that the Espero’s transmission was in neutral and that his brother’s feet were on the brake. In the police report, a diagram shows that Salihee’s car was pulled all the way over to the left side of the street, parallel to the curb.

The evidence suggests that Salihee might have had his hands raised. Four fingers on Salihee’s right hand were missing. Although it’s possible that a bullet other than the fatal bullet caused the injury (there were conflicting stories that an Iraqi soldier might also have fired), the missing fingers and the angle of fire are consistent with a bullet striking a raised hand.

The details may be murky, but in retrospect it is fairly clear what happened. The real problem was that the platoon did not put out cones and wire — if they had Yasser would have stopped. Then came the fateful turning car, followed by another car coming around it. The soldiers were on edge, but they seem to have followed their rules of engagement. It was a typical misunderstanding, of the sort that happens all the time in Iraq.

After Joe fired at the windshield he walked to the car and saw that Salihee was covering his eye with his right hand, but as he watched the hand fell and blood poured from the wound in the man’s head. Not long after the shooting, Joe’s unit left the area. “We had to leave the scene and that was fucked up, but we had to continue our mission. Then we came back and I saw the lady crying and it got to me because I’m not out here to kill innocent people at all. When I saw her, that’s when I knew something was wrong.” The woman Joe saw was Raghad Salihee, Yasser’s wife, and in our conversation he returned several times to the moment he saw her near Salihee’s car. It’s an image that deeply troubles him.

On 2nd of July, before I found the sniper, Ayman had taken me out to the Salihee house in Saydiyah where I met Raghad Salihee for the first time. She is a lovely woman, also a physician. When we arrived, the entire family was in mourning. Raghad came into the living room and she was weeping when she said, “If I find the soldier, I will kill him.” After I came back from the embed with Joe’s unit, I spoke to her at the hotel about the killing of her husband. She spoke calmly as her daughter played nearby. “I want many things but I want the Americans to stop running in the street, they are killing anyone. I also want them to stop using these types of destructive bullets. I see the injuries in the hospital. If a bullet strikes someone in the abdomen or leg, the person dies. If they are shot in the brain, they die immediately.”

Raghad went on to say, “I want the Americans to go back to America, but I know they won’t go.” She asked me if I knew a lawyer in the United States who could take her husband’s case. As her daughter gazed hypnotically at the hotel pool, Raghad said, “Can you help me? Please, can you help me?”

Yasser Salihee’s name has been added to a steadily growing toll of civilian casualties of the Iraq war. A Web site, Iraqbodycount.net, has estimated that at as many as 26,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion. Because the organization compiled the number from verified news reports, the true toll is higher, since not all of the civilian casualties appear in the press.

The Army is conducting an investigation of Salihee’s shooting, as it does in all shootings of civilians that result in death. Considering the murky circumstances and the Army’s rules of engagement, it seems unlikely that any disciplinary action will be taken. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the spokesman for coalition troops in Iraq said he did not know of any soldier who had been punished for shooting a civilian in traffic or at a checkpoint.

One day in early June, Yasser found a set of X-rays in my hotel room. He said, “Hey, man, what are you doing with X-rays?” I explained that they belonged to a boy named Rakan Hassan, who was wounded by American soldiers when they fired on his parents’ car in Tal Afar earlier this year. The boy’s parents were killed. Yasser held the X-rays up to the light and read them, pointing out the fractures and the damage to the boy’s spine. This was the moment I learned he was a doctor, that he could do more than report the news and find sources for stories. Yasser would put down his notebook and help tend to wounded people. Yasser Salihee’s talents were not solely his own, they reached beyond him, into possibilities for his wounded country. But his future is gone, and with it goes a measure of hope for Iraq.

Before I left Joe at his company headquarters at Camp Victory, he said he wanted to tell the Salihee family he was sorry and that he’d never had to fire to stop a car before the 24th of June. “If I’d seen his hands up, no way would I have fired a shot. We didn’t murder him. No way was it murder,” Joe said. But there was desperation in his voice, as if he wasn’t sure.