Salon: City of Vengeance (the Mahdi Army in Baghdad)

[muriel_volestrangler]

A savage outbreak of retaliatory killings has pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war. In the first of three exclusive reports, our correspondent investigates the Mahdi Army's Baghdad death squads.

Iraq is accelerating toward civil war. Over the weekend and on Monday, July 10, Baghdad witnessed the most savage outbreak of revenge killings to date. Shiite militiamen, who witnesses claimed were members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints in the city's al-Jihad neighborhood, inspected ID cards and killed 42 people they identified as being Sunnis. They also broke into homes and killed their inhabitants. Corpses were found in the street with drill holes and pierced by nails and bolts. These attacks, which took place after sunrise, were clearly acts of revenge for two earlier car bombings near Shiite mosques. In turn, the checkpoint killings spurred two more huge Sunni car bomb attacks in the Sadr-dominated neighborhood of Talbiyeh, killing 25 and wounding 41.

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."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/12/baghdad/