City of vengeance

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.

Next page: A Mahdi Army official admits his group runs secret courts and executes prisoners