Iraqis are terrified because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are death squads

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http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51469/

Bush's "surge" has put army and police checkpoints everywhere in Baghdad but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in fact death squads.

"Be careful," warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad," be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army." He added that insecurity in the Iraqi capital is now as bad as it was before the US security plan came into operation in the city in February.

The so-called 'surge', the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.

There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members. Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that the name Omar is used only by Sunni. Three days later the boy was found dead.

I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled to one side at an army checkpoint. I was sitting in the back seat and had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was.