The Gifts of Freedom

No Escaping Iraq Violence
Gunmen abduct more than 50 at a bus zone in Baghdad, where daily life can be torn apart without warning.
By Megan K. Stack and Saif Rasheed, Times Staff Writers
June 6, 2006

BAGHDAD — Clad in camouflage uniforms, the gunmen came peeling through the thick morning heat in police trucks. They stopped at a downtown strip of travel companies where Iraqis gather each morning to board buses bound for the safer lands of Syria and Jordan.

The gunmen leaped to the ground, witnesses said, and they worked fast. They seized more than 50 bystanders, pulling men away from their families and hauling drivers from behind the wheels of the buses. They handcuffed the men, blindfolded them and stuffed them into the backs of the trucks like human loot. They covered some of their captives with sheets.

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And then they were gone, slamming doors and speeding off into the brilliant morning sunlight. It was only 9 o'clock in a city where security has come unraveled, just another mundane scene that splintered suddenly into violence.

"Those are criminals going after the ransom," said Saad Tawil, a 42-year-old manager of one of the travel companies clustered on the street in downtown Baghdad. "They will see who is important or rich, and who is not, after interrogating them."

But other mass kidnappings that have struck the capital this year remain unsolved. In some cases, the victims have never turned up, living or dead.

The mass kidnapping came one day after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki was forced to concede that Iraq's warring factions were too mutually distrustful to agree on who should run the security services. Having suspended indefinitely a parliament vote on those key ministries, Maliki has left the army and police leadership dangling in a vacuum at a time when bloodshed in Baghdad, and across Iraq, has spiraled upward.

In Baghdad, leaving home to work, shop or visit family has become an increasingly dangerous proposition. Violence rears up without warning; residents navigate a citywide obstacle course of roadside bombs, shootouts and security checkpoints.

The city just had its deadliest month since U.S.-led forces invaded the country in 2003, new Iraqi government documents indicate. More people were shot, stabbed or otherwise violently killed in May than in any other month since the invasion, according to Health Ministry statistics. The figure does not include slain soldiers or civilians killed in bombings, on whom autopsies are not usually performed.

Last month alone, 1,398 bodies were brought to Baghdad's central morgue, the ministry said. All over the city and out into the provinces, corpses surface on a daily basis in garbage dumps, in abandoned cars or along roadsides. They often bear marks of bondage and torture.

The attacks are frequently characterized by their brazen nature. Gunmen climbed onto a Baghdad bus Monday and killed at least two Shiite students, an Interior Ministry source said.

Over the weekend, masked gunmen set up a roadblock north of Baghdad, stopped a passing bus and ordered the men to disembark. Dividing the Sunnis from the Shiites, they told the Shiites they were "traitors" who would be killed on religious principle, a witness told the Associated Press.

The assailants shot their victims execution-style. When they were done, 24 passengers were dead. Most of them were teenage university students and elderly men.

Cry "havoc" and let slip the dogs of war....

War is not "waged" so much as it is "unleashed" and it is not a tame force.